nerd

Related to the posts on Chapter 1 of How Nonviolence Protects the State:

I wanted to separate this off because this sentence actually works against Peter's claims because he neglected his own phrasing to recognise what he had said.

From South End version:

Resistance to British colonialism included enough militancy that the Gandhian method can be viewed most accurately as one of several competing forms of popular resistance.

To the Active Distro:

Resistance to British colonialism was so militant that the Gandhian method can be viewed most accurately as just one of several competing forms of popular resistance.

The biggest issue is that he highlights it was “one of several competing forms of popular resistance.” But he doesn't stop to elaborate on why there would even be competing resistances. He occasionally points to these things (but doesn't tie them into that *competition) with regards to what was happening. He even points to there having been a “rival revolutionary.”

The thing he's overlooking, in favour of focusing on Gandhi's “nonviolence” movement is that he was engaging in a struggle for power. Even within the text of his book (like the email from “Gopal K”), he points to this very concept and seems to walk right by it in order to demonise all nonviolence.

All of this is still without elaborating on what that definition even is. He's never once outlined what “nonviolence” means, and he presumes that we agree with his understanding of “pacifist.”

Reading that bit between the lines actually weakens Peter's arguments because it makes me wonder what “nonviolent” action was supporting the “violent” action; the two can't coincide without the other, and this is also where I keep finding frustration with his inability to define terms, like “militancy.”

If you don't want to define terms, you're going to force me to use my understandings and that is going to undermine your argument because we don't share an understanding in this instance.

Peter also references Bhagat Singh's death sentence in a footnote. You would think this would've made it into his text to counter how Gandhi still supported some aspects of British rule, which doesn't mean that nonviolence supported British rule but that Gandhi found it useful for what he could become. From footnote 7 (South End)/footnote 8 (Active Distro):

Reeta Sharma, “What if Bhagat Singh Had Lived?” The Tribune of India, March 21, 2001. It is important to note that people across India beseeched Gandhi to ask for the commutation of Bhagat Singh’s death sentence, given for the assassination of a British official, but Gandhi strategically chose not to speak out against the state execution, which many believe he easily could have stopped. Thus was a rival revolutionary removed from the political landscape.

Note: Link included as hyperlink for the sake of both appearances and ease.

From the text that he references (this is from Reeta Sharma's writing), this paragraph exists that highlights exactly the frustrations that I've had with his presentation of “pacifists manipulate the history” when we know the history was manipulated otherwise by the powerful:

Historian Dr Rajiv Lochan whose major research work revolves around Mahatma Gandhi puts this whole historical perspective in the following observations: “From all events and records available it is quite obvious that Gandhiji perceived both Subhas Chander Bose and Bhagat Singh as potential threats to his own highly acclaimed position.”

So would this not prove that Gandhi was weaponising nonviolence for his own benefit? This isn't that all nonviolence is ineffective but that some people have ulterior motives, weaponising a specific understanding of nonviolence. To me, this feels like Peter failed to analyse the texts at his disposal in favour of continuing to argue with one guy.

(Tangent: The spelling of Subhas Chander Bose here makes me wonder why he changed the spelling in the updated text to 'Subhash'. Just a passing curiosity.)

Book: How Nonviolence Protects the State Chapter: Nonviolence is Ineffective Author: Peter Gelderloos Published: 2018(?) / Active Distribution & Detritus

This version rewrites and reorganises somet bits. Previously, he wrote:

Typical examples are the independence of India from British colonial rule, caps on the nuclear arms race, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and the peace movement during the war against Vietnam.

This is now:

Typically making the list are the independence of India from British colonial rule, the peace movement during the war against Vietnam, caps on the nuclear arms race, and the Civil Rights movement of the '60s.

After this sentence is where the Houser citation is added, and they just deleted a defunct link (but also didn't try to find and include it again; this piece still exists, which I've archived here because of that paper's continued refusal to enable people in the EU to read it otherwise).

Footnote 5 is entirely new. It reads:

This necessity may go towards explaining why pacifists are almost always the ones who attempt to control the tactics and participation of others within the movement. One would be hard-pressed to find an example of a revolutionary activist trying to force a pacifist to throw a brick through a window, whereas nearly every person in the movement today has likely witnessed attempts by nonviolent activists to force everyone else to adhere to their tactics in protests and campaigns, through “peace-policing,” nonviolence codes, and the like.

This is, again, refusing to actually name the problem. It's not pacifists that are the issue; it's literally lessons learned from liberal democracy. Again, he's picking the wrong fights because he hasn't actually engaged with the history of a subject; he's just cherry-picked a guy to prove him wrong (because he is wrong), and then he turned that into a book. The more I look at this chapter, the more it feels exactly like that.

At least have the tact to be honest about it. When people catch me subposting them and call me on it, I acknowledge it.

Anyway, Footnote 10 (which is 9 in the old text) is updated, and I suspect it's because a lot of people would've found it strange. It still is, though, because it's not explaining why he's pulling from this email exchange and who this guy is. It now reads:

Quoting activist and Virginia Tech Professor Gopal K, from an email he wrote to me, September 2004. Gopal also writes, “I have friends in India who still haven't forgiven Gandhi for this.

All I'm going to say is that it's even more weird here because I can't find anyone at Virginia Tech named Gopal. The only thing I can find with a 'gopal k' is the comment on this article about violence at Virginia Tech. Usually, professors are pretty easy to find. What kind of professor was he?

Anyway, he changed the paragraph about India that starts with “We realize” to the following:

We realize this threat to be even more direct when we understand that the pacifist history of India’s is a falsification—nonviolence was not universal in India. Resistance to British colonialism was so militant that the Gandhian method can be viewed most accurately as just one of several competing forms of popular resistance.

More minor changes are adding words like “immensely” because I guess the sentence before wasn't powerful enough. It just reminds me of how certain political figures speak with the excessively added adjectives; it's also strange because the first one usually reads with better flow and doesn't feel like it's screaming at me (as much) to believe what Peter tells me to. Whatever, his choice.

This entire section changes from the following (old text):

The pacifist history of India’s struggle cannot make any sense of the fact that Subhas Chandra Bose, the militant candidate, was twice elected president of the Indian National Congress, in 1938 and 1939. While Gandhi was perhaps the most singularly influential and popular figure in India’s independence struggle, the leadership position he assumed did not always enjoy the consistent backing of the masses. Gandhi lost so much support from Indians when he “called off the movement” after the 1922 riot that when the British locked him up afterwards, “not a ripple of protest arose in India at his arrest.”

To this:

The pacifist history of India’s struggle cannot make any sense of the fact that Subhash Chandra Bose, the militant candidate, won the elections for the presidency of the Indian National Congress, in 1939; and it was the pacifist's political power, not their popular support, that allowed them to maneuver themselves to the head of the movement. Far from a universally popular hero, Gandhi lost so much of his support from Indians when he “called off the movement” after the 1922 riot that when the British locked him up afterwards, “not a ripple of protest arose in India at his arrest.”

Stronger statements, but those statements still aren't being used to actually critique what he thinks he's critiquing. This doesn't sound like a critique of nonviolence or pacifism; it sounds like a specific critique of Gandhi, his goals, and the people around him. They probably would've pulled the same shit even if they weren't doing “nonviolence.”

The weirder thing is also just that, while these points are trying to debunk the one guy... It just feels like he's not able to debunk him and actually create a compelling argument for how nonviolence is ineffective.

He reorganises the book a lot, though the text is vaguely different. Same meaning, occasionally added phrases that just make it more verbose... It's kind of tedious.

The original book went to a paragraph about the nuclear arms race, which was then followed by the US Civil Rights Movement. Instead, the paragraph following his discussion of India is about the US peace movement that ended the Vietnam War. This is then followed by 'capping the nuclear arms race' and then the Civil Rights Movement. This also means all the citations get wonky, too!

Some changes include changing this sentence:

The claim that the US peace movement ended the war against Vietnam contains the usual set of flaws.

to this:

The claim that the US peace movement ended the war against Vietnam follows the same path.

This is just funny because you can tell he took on some kind of criticism to make it “less” polemic and to build an argument that bridges the events he's discussing into one coherent piece.

Nuclear arms paragraph doesn't really change.

Bits were added to the US Civil Rights Movement, such as changing this sentence:

On the contrary, though pacifist groups such as Martin Luther King Jr.‘s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had considerable power and influence, popular support within the movement, especially among poor black people, increasingly gravitated toward militant revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party.

by adding:

—were granted considerable power and influence by white people in positions of power—

between 'influence' and 'popular'.

Weirdly, while it's obvious that some text was updated and clarified, he didn't think to double-check his knowledge about events that happened? Like, it's one thing to say that something is linked to al-Qaeda, but it's another when the modern narrative contradicts that:

On March 11, 2004, just days before the voting booths opened, multiple bombs planted by an Al Qaida-linked cell exploded in Madrid train stations, killing 191 people, and injuring thousands more.

There has never been evidence that these were linked to Al-Qaeda, and even Spanish courts highlighted this mere years after the first publication of his book. It's one thing to get it wrong then, but it's an entire other to not even try to update that information. (And while I'm not a huge fan of state-as-evidence, it's still noteworthy that even the Spanish state has said it wasn't al-Qaeda.)

... I also don't understand why it is that Peter, like... reorganised this the way he did because it didn't change anything. There's a lot of smashed-together paragraphs (not sure why; the original paragraphing made more sense and was cleaner), he adds a lot of “And” or “But” to the beginning of sentences for no apparent reason... I just don't understand why many of the changes happened.

But those changes also make it weird that he didn't even try to update for new knowledge or information; he didn't even add footnotes to be like “Whoops, I said this happened in 2004 very confidently, and got it wrong.” He also did change footnotes because the original version used “Ibid” for every time he cited Bauer, but the newer version just makes it obvious that he pulls from one source because it's just like “Yehuda Bauer” for about 10 citations in a row (for the entirety of the section about the Holocaust).

Edit: Another weird? Part of this is that Peter “corrected” Colman McCarthy's name in the updated version and it is wrong. He changed the spelling to Coleman, but that's not his name.

Book: How Nonviolence Protects the State Chapter: Nonviolence is Ineffective [Part 2: Vietnam, the Holocaust] Author: Peter Gelderloos Published: 2007 / South End Press

I feel like I've read more of these books that Peter did at the point in time he wrote this book (and I literally started reading some of them in the middle of reading this fucking book). Anyway, moving on to the US peace movement to end the war against Vietnam.

The claim that the US peace movement ended the war against Vietnam contains the usual set of flaws. The criticism has been well made by Ward Churchill and others, so I’ll only summarize it.

Just to note: Ward Churchill did this better 20 years before Peter did.

Anyway, as Peter says, practically the entirety of it is a summary coming from Ward Churchill's essay, and I don't want to put more here because that's less engaging with Peter's points and engaging with Ward's... Which I already did. All of the whole third edition, even. And honestly, there's no point engaging with something where he's basically rehashed someone else's work. (Also, I don't understand why even the author of the work he literally summarised finds this piece to be so valuable, as stated in the fucking third edition of that old ass essay that Peter's rehashing! Ugh, it's so absurd. Whatever.)

Some pacifists will point out the huge number of “conscientious objectors” who refused to fight, to salvage some semblance of a nonviolent victory. But it should be obvious that the proliferation of objectors and draft dodgers cannot redeem pacifist tactics. Especially in such a militaristic society, the likelihood of soldiers’ refusing to fight is proportional to their expectations of facing a violent opposition that might kill or maim them. Without the violent resistance of the Vietnamese, there would have been no need for a draft; without a draft, the self-serving nonviolent resistance in North America would hardly have existed. Far more significant than passive conscientious objectors were the growing rebellions, especially by black, Latino, and indigenous troops, within the military. The US government’s intentional plan, in response to black urban riots, of taking unemployed young black men off the streets and into the military, backfired.

I'm not going to get into the whole thing about conscientious objectors here (I don't have an opinion on whether it a good tactic, but I can acknowledge that it was an available tactic). I just want to point out the weirdness of Peter's whole “if this thing wasn't happening, these self-serving nonviolent resisters wouldn't have existed.” The fact is that it did exist, and this is also collapsing the work of draft dodgers into a nonviolent movement. This would be like if I assumed all draft dodgers were the same as Bush II (who “avoided” the Vietnam War), but I know they weren't all the same. I don't think we should look down on people who are objecting to being drafted and facing consequences for it, especially in the face of trying to figure out how to solve the problem at hand. (And amongst us, who knows how to perfectly halt a military?)

I'd also like Peter to examine what options were available to many people and why certain actions happened. Yeah, there were rebellions in the military (often done by non-white people), but why were those rebellions taking place inside the military in the first place? This isn't to look down upon those people, but it is worth investigating because it's a valid question. What was happening to push more non-white people into the military (both at home and abroad), what were their reasons for initially not pushing back (because there were many who didn't), and what causes were prompting rebellions (because not every rebellion is the same; some could've been over internal treatment, such as racism within the military, while others could've been actual objections of what they were being coerced to do)?

I mean, context is key. We can't just assume that all rebellions were the same, but we can analyse how those rebellions impacted military structure, leadership, and success. (e.g., Even if the rebellion was mostly about racist treatment by white military officers toward non-white soldiers, what impact did that have on the whole of the military campaign and decreasing its success?)

Peter doesn't do this, which is detrimental to the argument. I also think it's at least a valuable understanding that is necessary in order to recognise how things can function or why things happened the way they did, giving us a better understanding of how to do these things now or what kinds of things might be more viable. Which is weird, because another of the sources he almost exclusively uses throughout this section does just that. From False Nationalism, False Internationalism:

The Vietnam War posed a new crisis for the Black petty-bourgeoisie, many of whom were anticipating the fruits of Federal Civil Rights patronage. Traditionally the Black petty-bourgeoisie had welcomed the U.S. Empire's foreign wars. Wartime was viewed as an exceptional opportunity to “advance the race.” During wartime the need for New Afrikan labour and men at arms gave the Black leadership a chance to demonstrate their useful loyalty to the Empire—and ask for concessions in return. W.E.B. DuBois and the NAACP supported the U.S. war effort during World War I (a position DuBois soon regretted). In World War II A. Philip Randolph, Paul Robeson, Adam Clayton Powell and the NAACP gave all-out support for the US conquests in Europe and Asia.

... And they continue from there to explain the history of the moment (which includes resistance to the draft by Black people, along with a related anti-draft movement that happened in 1948). And a continued point that they make is that the petty-bourgeoisie kept selling people out. They'd get some of the concessions they wanted because the Government gave it to them, and then they'd give in; it's interesting that Peter so often ignores the way that leadership in certain movements abandoning their followers is the most likely cause of failure. The hints are all right there, but he keeps overlooking it.

Not to mention they also highlight that people being anti-draft (who would also be considered draft dodgers and conscientious objectors) were working on other fronts. Again from False Nationalism, False Internationalism:

Propaganda campaigns took place around the 1965 draft refusals of General Gordon Baker in Detroit and Ernie Allen in California.

They also bring up how Muhammad Ali's draft refusal made opposition to the Vietnam War very obvious and unable to be hidden, too. Meanwhile, rather than contextualising a variety of contexts, Peter generalises it. Is he right? Well, only if we choose a context from our own understanding that fits his generalisations. But if I've had a lot of knowledge of other historical events that have involved a range of tactics, including nonviolent ones that were used in tandem with other tactics, then it doesn't work. But he just doesn't do the work to point directly at the people of whom he speaks, which means the audience gets to basically infer whoever they think it is that he's critiquing.

He also then starts referencing this... article? by Matthew Rinaldi, though he's apparently got a book version somewhere (maybe it's a zine?). The quote he pulls is from the opening (surprise), and it's also an uncited polemic piece. The “uncited” aspect is more frustrating for it creating a lack of being able to verify things that I might not immediately recognise. However, that source also provides more evidence that nonviolent actions helped spark other actions in relation to movements against Vietnam:

The majority of these early instances of resistance were actually simply acts of refusal; refusal to go to Vietnam, to carry out training, to obey orders. They were important in that they helped to directly confront the intense fear which all GIs feel; they helped to shake up the general milieu of passivity. But they still focused on individual responsibility. In a sense they were a continuation of civilian resistance politics transferred to the military setting, the notion that individual refusal would shake the system. But the military was quite willing to deal with the small number of GIs who might put their heads on the chopping block; to really affect the military machine would require a more general rebellion.

And they also go through a lot of nonviolent (by definition) resistance that was done, even by enlisted soldiers. Not to mention, this is right there in that same source, too:

For another thing, they went in with some expectations, generally with a recruiter's promise of training and a good job classification, often with an assurance that they wouldn't be sent to Vietnam. When these promises weren't kept, enlistees were really pissed off. A study commissioned by the Pentagon found that 64% of chronic AWOLs during the war years were enlistees, and that a high percentage were Vietnam vets.

Which also highlights yet another reason why Peter needs context for what he's discussing. There's a lot of context that genuinely matters.

And also, a lot of this context here is sort of frustrating? Like, I don't want to be awful towards veterans, but I also think that many veterans—particularly those who willingly chose to volunteer, though there are subsets of drafted/conscripted soldiers who I would also have similar frustrations with—need to come to terms with the harms they've done. I also think they need to understand why there are people who are hostile, cautious, or defensive towards them; there are a lot of people who've been hurt by the military both internally and externally, and veterans need to understand what they represent and vehemently work against it.

But I also think we need to weaponise against these colonial/imperial forces when we recognise their dissatisfaction, so recognising that as a tactical moment is necessary. If they're unhappy about something (see: people who joined ICE for that $50k bonus but failed to read the fine print), then maybe we can weaponise that to our own advantage. But that doesn't mean we need to work with them unless they actively repudiate and work against those systems. People don't have to trust them (and that's kind of something in that Libcom piece that keeps coming through, about how GIs were upset that non-GIs were initially hostile towards them—again, the context of Vietnam is much different than the context of Iraq, so I can understand veterans of Vietnam feeling upset by it to a degree, but I'd also like to think they recognise the pain they caused a lot of people).

... And now I'm arguing with Rinaldi's framing, so let's just get back to Peter:

The Pentagon estimated that 3 percent of officers and noncoms killed in Vietnam from 1961 to 1972 were killed in fraggings by their own troops. This estimate doesn’t even take into account killings by stabbing or shooting.

Here's a fun bit. Peter has been citing things for a bit, but this one didn't come with a citation. And I thought it sounded... idk, it at least sounded like something that needed a citation? So I looked around a bit and found this:

“The Pentagon has now disclosed that fraggings in 1970 (209 killings) have more than doubled those of the previous year (96 killings). Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.” Congressional hearings on fraggings held in 1973 estimated that roughly 3% of officer and non-com deaths in Vietnam between 1961 and 1972 were a result of fraggings. But these figures were only for killings committed with grenades, and didn’t include officer deaths from automatic weapons fire, handguns and knifings.

Which uh... Interesting paraphrasing of something, at least. It's also worth highlighting, once again, that these statistics are are uncited (which is strange because why not say where that information came from) and have been difficult to verify? Rather, I've been having trouble verifying them at the moment. Like, I know fraggings happened, but how common they were is up for question (also, Peter tries to create the assumption that these many of fraggings were happening because people were upset with the military's existence in places like Vietnam, but there are stories about people like this guy who was just tired of his superior officer's bullshit and thought he deserved to die).

... I had to hunt for something else by the same guy that's supposedly in the same book, which made me find this PDF. Trying to follow Peter's sources is a pain in the ass. From that piece:

A number of years ago, in a deceitful article in Mother Jones magazine, corporate liberal historian Todd Gitlin claimed that the peaceful and legal aspects of the 1960’s U.S. anti-war movement had been the most successful opposition to a war in history. Gitlin was dead wrong; as a bourgeois historian, Gitlin is paid to render service unto capital by getting it wrong, and get it wrong he does, again and again. The most effective “anti-war” movement in history was at the end of World War One, when proletarian revolutions broke out in Russia, Germany and throughout Central Europe in 1917 and 1918. A crucial factor in the revolutionary movement of that time was the collapse of the armies and navies of Russian and Germany in full-scale armed mutiny. After several years of war and millions of casualties the soldiers and sailors of opposing nations began to fraternise with each other, turned their guns against their commanding officers and went home to fight against the ruling classes that had sent them off to war.

This piece also does a better job at critiquing what Peter wants to critique. It does exactly what Peter's been missing, though I'd suggest a few more lines to highlight it (e.g., What is the role of Mother Jones in the grand scheme of things?). It at least highlights what Todd Gitlin's role is, why he wrote what he did, and what the purpose of his writing is. It's like understanding where the propaganda is coming from, why it's coming from there, and being able to recognise the role of those institutions (and the people who participate within them) is key.

Whereas millions of peaceful activists voting in the streets like good sheep have not weakened the brutal occupation in any measurable way, a few dozen terrorists willing to slaughter noncombatants were able to cause the withdrawal of more than a thousand occupation troops.

I am extremely uncomfortable with Peter's ability to coldly look at the murders of noncombatants, and this framing is so bizarre for what he's even talking about.

Also, his book was published in 2007? Did no one stop to check the news in 2006 or so? Because people were talking about how there was no evidence to link these bombings to Al-Qaeda then. Maybe this is a missed detail, but it's still interesting to see him blatantly state it as fact... and also let the socialists get away with some racism while having utilised Islamists in their calls after the bombing... which he doesn't do for the conservatives at their ethnic hatred toward the Basque by weaponising ETA. (Personally, I think both are gross.)

The actions and statements of cells affiliated with Al Qaida do not suggest that they want a meaningful peace in Iraq, nor do they demonstrate a concern for the well-being of the Iraqi people (a great many of whom they have blown to bits) so much as a concern for a particular vision of how Iraqi society should be organized, a vision that is extremely authoritarian, patriarchal, and fundamentalist. And, no doubt, what was possibly an easy decision to kill and maim hundreds of unarmed people, however strategically necessary such an action may have seemed, is connected to their authoritarianism and brutality, and most of all to the culture of intellectualism from which most terrorists come (although that is another topic entirely).

I don't know, I think it's worth exploring how this kind of violence is actually perpetuating negative systems and maintaining hierarchies. I think it also fits within the scope of this kind of book, where we have to actually engage with the nuance of violence and what kind of violence is acceptable and what kind of violence is unacceptable.

But I can't say I find it surprising that someone who is so skittish of KYLR discourse and who thinks all abusers should go to therapy (despite evidence of therapy helping abusers to be better at hiding their abuse and obfuscating it behind therapy-speak rather than stopping abuse) would want to avoid such a topic. I do find it weird because the kind of violence named by KYLR (and other anti-abuser violence) would actually fit very well into the discussion here.

Being able to discern between how people utilise tactics and for what purpose is actually very necessary, but he weirdly shies away from that. It's also interesting because he then follows that paragraph with this:

The morality of the situation becomes more complicated when compared to the massive US bombing campaign that intentionally killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Germany and Japan during World War II. Whereas this campaign was much more brutal than the Madrid bombings, it is generally considered acceptable. The discrepancy that we may entertain between condemning the Madrid bombers (easy) and condemning the even more bloody-handed American pilots (not so easy, perhaps because among them we may find our own relatives — my grandfather, for example) should make us question whether our condemnation of terrorism really has anything to do with a respect for life. Because we are not fighting for an authoritarian world, or one in which blood is spilled in accordance with calculated rationales, the Madrid bombings do not present an example for action, but, rather, an important paradox. Do people who stick to peaceful tactics that have not proved effective in ending the war against Iraq really care more for human life than the Madrid terrorists? After all, many more than 191 Iraqi civilians have been killed for every 1,300 occupation troops stationed there. If anyone has to die (and the US invasion makes this tragedy inevitable), Spanish citizens bear more blame than Iraqis (just as German and Japanese citizens bore more blame than other victims of World War II). So far, no alternatives to terrorism have been developed within the relatively vulnerable belly of the beast to substantially weaken the occupation. Hence, the only real resistance is occurring in Iraq, where the US and its allies are most prepared to meet it, at great cost to the lives of guerrillas and noncombatants.

Generally considered acceptable by whom, Peter? While this bit of information is beyond the scope, views about Hiroshima and Nagasaki have shifted immensely (at least according to 2025 Pew research). It's also interesting to note that they found that, even today, men are more likely to view these things as justified. To me, this suggests that the views on violence here are quite masculinist and refuse to acknowledge the perspectives and nuance that often exists within other spheres of understanding.

And while this blog post is from 2020, it's still worth exploring the sources that it references. Like this article from Harper's Magazine that was republished in 2006.

I think we need to also engage with propaganda and actually explore how certain things can be considered acceptable. But I also think that this whole thing is nonsensical framing of an issue. “People protesting did nothing, but terrorists succeeded” is just truly bizarre analysis of a situation, and it's just incredibly superficial in every conceivable way possible.

So much for the victories of pacifism.

It would also help to understand the extent of the idea’s failures

Let's highlight the fact that Peter originally stated this at the beginning:

I could spend plenty of time talking about the failures of nonviolence. Instead, it may be more useful to talk about the successes of nonviolence.

He has spent plenty of time talking about the failures. That is all he has done, in fact. At no point has he engaged with any successful aspects of pacifism, pacifists who work within other movements and recognise the value of their allies, pacifists who've understood that self-defense isn't violence (and that engaging in self-defense doesn't deny their pacifism)... Here's another fun thought: Just like not all anarchist texts represent all anarchists, not all pacifist texts represent all pacifists. (Even they have had a lot of philosophical discussion around what tactics are available.)

He's done literally nothing of the sort to look at the way that nonviolent tactics have to be utilised alongside other tactics, regardless of level of violence. If it weren't for varying support networks behind the scenes (often ignored, particularly by white men), would the “violent” people who've succeeded... actually done so? Could that level of apparent violence actually have been sustained?

Have we noticed that so much of the discussion around anarchist tactics often leaves out things like mutual support, mutual care, carework, and all the things people don't get upheld for because it's just expected that someone does it without complaint (usually the most feminine among us)?

This cute quippy ~sarcasm~ is really obnoxious, and it does nothing for his analytical capabilities. If anything, it makes it seem like he's analysing something when he actually isn't. Cool rhetorical tool, but it's useless all the same.

A controversial but necessary example is that of the Holocaust.

Footnote: Churchill’s own contributions to the topic, which informed my own...

Cool. Rehashing Ward Churchill again. I already read that essay, and I didn't do it so I could re-read it in Peter's fucking book.

Some pacifists have been so bold as to use examples of resistance to the Nazis, such as civil disobedience carried out by the Danes, to suggest that nonviolent resistance can work even in the worst conditions. Is it really necessary to point out that the Danes, as Aryans faced a somewhat different set of consequences for resistance than the Nazis’ primary victims?

Footnote: The example of the Danes during the Holocaust was used by pacifist anarchist Colman McCarthy at his workshop “Pacifism and Anarchism” at the National Conference on Organized Resistance, American University (Washington, DC), February 4, 2006.

I think it's easy to read anything about or from Colman McCarthy and realise that he's a fool. But I also don't think he represents all anarchists or all pacifists or all anarcho-pacifists or whatever. (He also frequently published in Christian/Catholic outlets, so I think it's worth analysing his version of pacifism and how it interconnects to those things. Critiquing the ways religion, especially something as dominant and hierarchical as Christianity, creates passivity (not peace) is helpful, but this isn't something engaged with.)

The Holocaust was only ended by the concerted, overwhelming violence of the Allied governments that destroyed the Nazi state (though, to be honest, they cared far more about redrawing the map of Europe than about saving the lives of Roma, Jews, gays, leftists, Soviet prisoners of war, and others; the Soviets tended to “purge” rescued prisoners of war, fearing that even if they were not guilty of desertion for surrendering, their contact with foreigners in the concentration camps had contaminated them ideologically).

To me, if this is the framing we're to understand, it doesn't make sense that the violence of oppressive forces who seek to oppress other spaces that happen to... also “solve” a problem (without truly solving it but rather perpetuating it into other contexts, like the 1948 Nakba and everything that followed against the Palestinians)... is being used as examples of how nonviolence protects the state while violence disrupts it. These aren't really successes of violence, either. If anything, it's a relocation and a reshaping of the same oppressive forces, delaying and shifting their violence to others.

... For a few paragraphs, he's basically rehashing another book: Yehuda Bauer's The Chose Life: Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust. I say rehashing because, though he cites it, it feels like I may as well... read that book instead. (I tried, but I can't find it. I did find other Yehuda Bauer books, so maybe there'll be interesting things there... Granted, I also don't know that Bauer would be my go-to. I can't imagine that, for him, that's a new view; in fact, I went to go find how he had talked about Gaza prior to his death in 2024 because, in reading just a bit of Jews for Sale?, his flattening of Zionism was raising some red flags for me.)

Even where they did not personally take part in violent resistance, they multiplied their effectiveness immensely by supporting those who did.

Skipping over things I don't feel like fact-checking or finding deeper context on (for the time being), but I'm going to highlight this sentence... which is precisely what I've been saying for a lot of nonviolent action... which Peter still won't analyse as being interconnected. (But also, everything described prior are nonviolent acts of resistance... and he doesn't describe any violent acts of resistance. It's just bizarre framing, like saying that you've done a bunch of things to save a plant but giving it more water is what really did the trick.)

... It's kind of tiresome reading someone else's words in Peter's paraphrasings. At some point, it'd be nice to see him actually engage with other sources of information about the same thing so that he can do this weird thing that writers often try to do called analysis. This is like reading a school report where a student has found one source and never deviated, rewriting everything that source already said into their own work. (Except this isn't coerced; he chose to write this.)

Also funny is that his favourite Ward Churchill essay (which is what this feels based on) includes a citation that calls Yehuda Bauer a “zionist propagandist.” In another footnote in Churchill's essay, he even says this (and mentions Bauer's work as being part of it):

It is apprehension of precisely this point, whether concretely or intuitively, which seems to be guiding a school of revisionism which seeks to supplant images of the passivity of the preponderance of Jews during the Holocaust with a rather distorted impression that armed resistance to nazism was pervasive among this victim group... These efforts, and others like them, perform an admirable service in fleshing out the woefully incomplete record of Jewish resistance—and perhaps to counter notions that Jewish passivity resulted from congenital or cultural “cowardice,” misimpressions which should never have held currency anyway—but they do nothing to render the extent of Jewish armed struggle greater than it was.

So I find it particularly interesting that this is the primary (and often only) source being referenced in the entirety of Peter's work. If Churchill's work was so influential, why not heed what he says and maybe delve a bit deeper than one whole book? And yeah, the fact that this is premised on an entire one book is a relevant criticism because it does nothing to flesh out the realities of those events.

All of these violent uprisings slowed down the Holocaust. In comparison, nonviolent tactics (and, for that matter, the Allied governments whose bombers could easily have reached Auschwitz and other camps) failed to shut down or destroy a single extermination camp before the end of the war.

... Okay, but what. He already argued that the point of the Allied forces was for a redrawing of Europe and not to save people (as has been the popular narrative, despite how incorrect it is), so... Why mention that they could've gotten there when that's not the point, and you've already said as much?

I also don't think he's entirely wrong, but I also don't think he actually examines what violent uprisings did and what the whole situation was.

In the Holocaust, and less extreme examples from India to Birmingham, nonviolence failed to sufficiently empower its practitioners, whereas the use of a diversity of tactics got results.

You literally changed your argument and have not even been talking about actual diversity of tactics for the whole thing. In fact, you've ignored how the two things interconnect and rather than argue for people actually working towards merging ideas via diversity of tactics... have focused almost exclusively on violent aspects of uprisings. This has also neglected the ways in which a lot of nonviolent actors tend to function in support roles.

In the world today, governments and corporations hold a near-total monopoly on power, a major aspect of which is violence. Unless we change the power relationships (and, preferably, destroy the infrastructure and culture of centralized power to make impossible the subjugation of the many to the few), those who currently benefit from the ubiquitous structural violence, who control the militaries, banks, bureaucracies, and corporations, will continue to call the shots. The elite cannot be persuaded by appeals to their conscience. Individuals who do change their minds and find a better morality will be fired, impeached, replaced, recalled, assassinated.

Not... wrong, but c'mon. At no point does he even engage with what has helped promote this. We've been fed steady diets of propaganda in a range of places, from school to media to other institutions. Is there a reason he ignores this? Is there a reason that these are overlooked? Like, there's no questioning of where these things come from, even when he accidentally highlights it (e.g., when talking about India and how the British media basically uplifted Gandhi and... seriously, he said it and then ran away from it).

ANYWAY... That chapter is finished.

It's really weird how Peter pulled from sources that did far better critique to effectively rewrite (“update”?) a Marxist essay... but it's somehow worse than what likely inspired it. Yet everyone gives him hype for it (still!) despite the fact that it's kind of lazy as a creation. It's probably because he was known for ~anarchism~, despite the fact that a lot of this pulls almost exclusively from Marxists (not an inherent problem because you can learn from Marxists, but there's not a lot of actual anarchist critique or even explicit engagement with anarchism).

So it's not even like he's totally wrong in his chapter-wide argument with Houser, but he's just running through some of the points brought up in that readers' forum commentary.

Book: How Nonviolence Protects the State Chapter: Nonviolence is Ineffective [Part 1: Picking a fight with a guy, India, Civil Rights Movement] Author: Peter Gelderloos Published: 2007 / South End Press

I'm splitting this chapter into multiple posts to... help my brain.

I could spend plenty of time talking about the failures of nonviolence. Instead, it may be more useful to talk about the successes of nonviolence.

Here we go! Maybe he'll actually address the concerns mentioned previously.

I'm also going to add here that I find it frustrating that he frames it this way. He's not good at sarcasm or being snide in text, so he may as well have just said that he was going to look at the successes claimed by the program of coercive pacifism and what their realities really were.

Pacifism would hardly be attractive to its supporters if the ideology had produced no historical victories. Typical examples are the independence of India from British colonial rule, caps on the nuclear arms race, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and the peace movement during the war against Vietnam.[3] And though they have not yet been hailed as a victory, the massive protests in 2003 against the US invasion of Iraq have been much applauded by nonviolent activists.[4]

And related footnotes:

-3-: This particular list comes from an article written by Spruce Houser (Spruce Houser, “Domestic Anarchist Movement Increasingly Espouses Violence,” Athens News, August 12, 2004), a peace activist and self-proclaimed anarchist. I have seen these same putative victories declared by other pacifists time and again.

-4-: Hell NYC, 2/15: The Day the World Said No to War (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003). This book gives one a feel for the way peace activists celebrate these protests.

I'm not planning to read the above book (at this time), but I did at least go through the trouble of hunting down the commentary piece by Spruce Houser (and getting an archive link; the link in Peter's book is out of date, which is normal). That article is quite amusing for its own reasons, like this gem that tries to prove the inherent violent nature of some Bad Anarchists or something: “Czolgosz is the name of the anarchist who assassinated President McKinley in 1901 (anyone wishing to confirm this is welcome to contact the Eugene Weekly).”

Also, why can't you just... look it up somewhere? We did have both Google and Wikipedia in 2004, and I'm guessing that something about President McKinley would've been found on one of them even that early on.

This piece by Houser is terrible, but I can't say that he's entirely wrong when he says:

When I look at the world today, I see that the ills facing our society are precisely related to the willingness to inflict violence.

But I also disagree with him because, I think, in the face of violence... you might have to defend yourself. This makes me wonder if Peter will engage with the 'self-defense isn't violence' wing of the pacifist movement or if he's going to continue cherry-picking a handful of folks who say what helps him make his point.

Here's the list that Peter draws upon, and I think his editing of it is interesting. Again, Houser wrote:

Women's right to vote, more humane working conditions, liberation of subservient colonies, equal rights for racial minorities, ending the Vietnam war, the overthrow of dictatorships, a moratorium on nuclear power, capping an out-of-control nuclear arms race, and protection of old-growth forests have all been gained by movements based on nonviolence. The moral power of nonviolent resistance is limitless, constrained only by our ability to use it to its full capacity.

Again, Houser is largely flubbing a lot of this, and I think part of it is related to previous propaganda he'd engaged in and a lack of recognition for other materials. Gandhi may have been “nonviolent,” but he said the Jews should've gone willingly and submitted to the Nazis during the Holocaust... which doesn't really help Houser. MLK was gradually and incrementally shifting his political tactics prior to his assassination, even though his focus was still largely on nonviolent methods; it's also true that he (and others working with him) understood how violent methods helped support his prior nonviolent work, even if he didn't like them.

Houser, like Gelderloos, is cherry-picking based on incomplete datasets and knowledge while also mimicking someone who is knowledgeable about a thing. Back to Peter:

There is a pattern to the historical manipulation and whitewashing evident in every single victory claimed by nonviolent activists. The pacifist position requires that success must be attributable to pacifist tactics and pacifist tactics alone, whereas the rest of us believe that change comes from the whole spectrum of tactics present in any revolutionary situation, provided they are deployed effectively.

These are two different points being made, and it doesn't make sense. Yes, there is a pattern to the historical manipulation and whitewashing that takes place when people purely focus on nonviolence; I'd also argue that there is an extreme patriarchal and masculinist vision of the world when we focus primarily on violence and a refusal to understand the interconnectedness of the tactics of both.

Most pacifists do not purely translate victories to pacifist ideals. This is Peter cherry-picking some people who espouse specific views he wants to fight with, and that is also a form of manipulation of the historical narrative. Many pacifists recognise (and have recognised) that they have been helped by non-pacifists; a lot of them know that they both have different skills and abilities but that both of them are required for a movement to have success. In fact, this is true of examples of nonviolence movements listed in this very book (which he could've also read in Ward Churchill's essay).

I could do the same thing to the criticism of anarchism and making a statement about “why people shouldn't be anarchist” if I only focused on anarcho-nazis and ancaps, but people would rightly understand that this would be me cherry-picking an argument. Why is Peter allowed to do this for pacifists? (And I'm not even a pacifist.) Continuing the above paragraph to its conclusion:

Because no major social conflict exhibits a uniformity of tactics and ideologies, which is to say that all such conflicts exhibit pacifist tactics and decidedly non-pacifist tactics, pacifists have to erase the history that disagrees with them or, alternately, blame their failures on the contemporary presence of violent struggle.[5]

-5-: For example, as soon as a pacifist panelist at the anarchist conference mentioned in the introduction [North American Anarchist Convergence in Athens, Ohio in August 2004] was forced to admit that the civil rights struggle did not end victoriously, he changed directions without blinking an eye and blamed the struggle’s failure on militant liberation movements, saying that as the movement became violent, it started to lose ground. This argument ignores the fact that resistance against slavery and racial oppression was militant well before the late 1960s, and also disavows any specific analysis that might, say, correspond an increasing militancy with a decreasing base. Such correlations are factually nonexistent.

Is it just me, or does this sound like why Peter might have picked out Houser's commentary? It would also explain the “self-proclaimed anarchist” dig at Houser, even though I cannot find anywhere (in the limited amount of sources available) where Houser claimed to be an anarchist. Even his description on Athens News... just says activist. And it's not a requirement to be an anarchist to attend an anarchist conference.

I have no evidence of it, but the vibes are there.

In India, the story goes, people under the leadership of Gandhi built up a massive nonviolent movement over decades and engaged in protest, noncooperation, economic boycotts, and exemplary hunger strikes and acts of disobedience to make British imperialism unworkable. They suffered massacres and responded with a couple of riots, but, on the whole, the movement was nonviolent and, after persevering for decades, the Indian people won their independence, providing an undeniable hallmark of pacifist victory.

And later:

We realize this threat to be even more direct when we understand that the pacifist history of India’s independence movement is a selective and incomplete picture-nonviolence was not universal in India. Resistance to British colonialism included enough militancy that the Gandhian method can be viewed most accurately as one of several competing forms of popular resistance. As part of a disturbingly universal pattern, pacifists white out those other forms of resistance and help propagate the false history that Gandhi and his disciples were the lone masthead and rudder of Indian resistance.

I wonder if Peter realises that he'd have been better off working with, I don't know, someone like me or other school abolitionists on things like critiques of history and social sciences curricula in schools and how schooling shapes our thinking because that's what this is. This specific narrative is not the narrative coined specifically by the pacifist movement; it is the narrative coined by white people in power who wrote history books (and made museums) and wanted to minimise “violent” responses to brutal colonialism and imperialism. The fact that the pacifist movement uses it is testament to the power of the propaganda (largely via schooling) that many of these people went through.

While the people who grab for these examples are engaging in historical erasure and also racism and do need to learn more, it is a problem of what has been taught for years. They are to blame for their continued ignorance, but they are also grasping for what they were given.

This isn't a problem specific to pacifists; it's a problem specific to the rulers of a society who don't want to die for their ill-gotten gains, and society has been harmed for it. (These things are, thankfully, changing.)

(PS: I don't want to work with Peter.)

As part of a disturbingly universal pattern, pacifists white out those other forms of resistance and help propagate the false history that Gandhi and his disciples were the lone masthead and rudder of Indian resistance.

This isn't a “disturbingly universal pattern” about pacifists. If he took time to sit down with history curricula, he'd find one area in which the history was warped into the “proper” narrative. This is a “disturbingly universal pattern” of the ruling classes ensuring their safety, teaching the people about specific nonviolent patterns that supposedly work and securing themselves. If this was the aspect of nonviolence that he was critiquing, I'd find it compelling. In this format, it's lazy and shifts the blame to the wrong location... just because he was mad at some guy.

Professor Gopal K, email to author, September 2004. Gopal also writes, “I have friends in India who still haven’t forgiven Gandhi for this.”

This is a bizarre footnote. At least he does acknowledge that he engages with other people, but I don't know anything about this professor beyond the fact that he has friends who haven't forgiven Gandhi. Other than him presumably being Indian or tied to India in some way, why would you reach out to him? Or is it that this was part of a wider conversation that you were already having, remembered you had, and then referenced again which you could contextualise with a few more words?

I'm not looking for academic-standard citations and footnotes here, but it's... odd to not have context for why this exchange happened.

Significantly, history remembers Gandhi above all others not because he represented the unanimous voice of India, but because of all the attention he was given by the British press and the prominence he received from being included in important negotiations with the British colonial government. When we remember that history is written by the victors, another layer of the myth of Indian independence comes unraveled.

Peter, do you (or did you) honestly believe that this is the fault of pacifists and nonviolent activists? Because this isn't their fault. This is precisely what I described above with regards to what people learn and how it shapes their thinking. Your argument would've been better to have had with the state and schooling, looking at how coercive pacifism has been pushed on all of us.

The sorriest aspect of pacifists’ claim that the independence of India is a victory for nonviolence is that this claim plays directly into the historical fabrication carried out in the interests of the white-supremacist, imperialist states that colonized the Global South.

Ah, there we go. So it's that it “plays into,” but he doesn't make that distinction until now. If your claim is that pacifists manipulate history, then you need to show an example of that. You don't get to show an example of what is historical manipulation by [capitalists, ruling classes] and then change your framing... That's not very helpful because you've set up an argument against a group of ill-defined people that they're not entirely responsible for, even if you didn't intend to.

Moreover, India lost a clear opportunity for meaningful liberation from an easily recognizable foreign oppressor. Any liberation movement now would have to go up against the confounding dynamics of nationalism and ethnic/religious rivalry in order to abolish a domestic capitalism and government that are far more developed.

I'm genuinely struggling to connect his thoughts together because the direction doesn't make sense. If he wanted to point to how Gandhi weaponised his “nonviolence movement” for the sake of power and position, then what he says in this section would've made more sense and the connections actually would be there. I have no actual dots for how nonviolence, as a whole, is responsible for this failure.

Peter say it's true and therefore it's true. (I haven't read the citations, but I'd be interested to because one is Arundhati Roy and another is ... Vandana Shiva? Does Peter know who she is? Because whew, I think I'll be passing on her because she plays fast and loose with all manner of factual details.)

On balance, the independence movement proves to have failed.

Yes, but you didn't prove that it was the fault of nonviolence or pacificism. You proved that it failed, was still entrenched in colonial and imperial structures, now had to fight against nationalism, and... You neglected to engage with how people weaponised movements for their own purpose, which is literally what you keep running into with Gandhi. Instead of understanding it, you dodged that analysis to stay mad at strawmen (or just that one guy).

He continues a similar (and abridged) pattern with the other points mentioned. Set up a pin, knock it down; set up a pin, knock it down. Most of the points aren't wrong, but they do just pretend that nonviolence is as Houser claims it is. It's like this chapter was written to be a debate with him.

The next bit is about capping the nuclear arms race. There's not a lot here because, unlike India, it is one singular paragraph. But reading through what he mentions gives the same vibes:

Once again, the movement was not exclusively nonviolent; it included groups that carried out a number of bombings and other acts of sabotage or guerrilla warfare.

His issue is less with actual pacifists or pacifists as a whole and more with the ways in which these histories have been warped by the people who seek to maintain their power and do so via multiple routes. He doesn't engage with why people might believe in the Purely Nonviolent Narrative; he just acts like they are the reason it happened (and often seems to conflate them with the actual issue).

The common projection (primarily by white progressives, pacifists, educators, historians, and government officials) is that the movement against racial oppression in the United States was primarily nonviolent.

Hey, Peter... What do you think would be a better critique since you said this? But you seem to think that all these categories share equal power when they don't. Educators and government officials, along with historians, all share something in common as groups that the other two do not. (And while educators and historians do not share the same level of power as government officials, they are complicit in their behaviours. This requires a degree of nuance while still recognising their role in promoting a specific narrative around nonviolence and violence.)

What might the difference between those groups be, Peter? Or do you not want to make that kind of critique because you keep leaning right up next to academics, finding them handing you some legitimacy? And a lot of your anarchodemic/general academic friends don't like when you critique that they hold position and do not want to reflect upon how the academy uses them to extract in the same colonialist/imperialist system (along with you, too, if we're honest).

On the contrary, though pacifist groups such as Martin Luther King Jr.‘s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had considerable power and influence, popular support within the movement, especially among poor black people, increasingly gravitated toward militant revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party.

The citation for this is False Nationalism, False Internationalism by E. Tani and Kae Sera, but the part cited here doesn't exactly fit what he's saying because it's in a list starting with:

So the reawakening of anti-colonial struggles here within the continental Empire in the 1960s was still ideologically unaware. It was a situation in which oppressed peoples went through rapid changes, trying and growing beyond different approaches and organizations, as cities burned and U.S. imperialism was thrown on the defensive. The oppressed started rediscovering their true situation, their own heritage, and the reality of their Nationhood. There were four main characteristics to those ‘60s movements:

1. They rapidly evolved toward armed struggle, with self-defense leading to armed organizations. Anti-government violence had mass approval and participation.

While this is kind of picky, Peter explains 'they' in the quote (which is the above point 1 from a list of four) as being “the civil rights movement and the black liberationist/anti-colonial movement.” From my reading the paragraph above that, it would be clear that 'they' is referring to 'oppressed people', and that would be largely inclusive of all oppressed peoples (particularly non-white), as the quote that opens the chapter (which is literally above the first cited paragraph) is largely inclusive, listing: Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Indians.

I also think, in the context of the opening of that chapter, it's important to make that distinction because the chapter isn't discussing pure nonviolence. But part of the critique is even found within that list of four things, particularly in points 3 and 4:

1. National liberation struggles here were not seen as isolated to themselves, but as parts of a world revolution of the oppressed. People were influenced by India, Ghana, Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, and many other peoples struggles. Crazy Horse and Ho were both seen as heroic teachers. Socialism was introduced as an alternative to the “American Way.”

2. The urban movements were in most cases under the class leadership of the petty bourgeoisie and the lumpen. Which meant that their political programs embodied an ambivalent, “love-hate” relationship towards imperialism. Even the most militant organizations were amalgamations of those who were fighting for liberation and those who, whatever thought they were doing, were fighting for a share of Babylon.

This is not an indication of “all nonviolence is ineffective,” but it is a critique that the petty bourgeoisie played a role as being an obstacle through coercive pacifism and appeals to hegemonic nonviolence. Further, the paragraph after the list states:

The national movements did not reach a proletarian viewpoint. This limitation undermined the great advances of the ‘60s movements. Even among those who picked up the gun, driven by anger and need for change, even within revolutionary organizations, this covered-over ambivalence helped create setback after setback.

They point toward the ambivalence toward imperialism and the utilisation of coercive pacifism. These are not the same as just saying that nonviolence is the problem. One more time, the critique towards the Civil Rights Movement in that text and in that chapter states:

The impending failure of the non-violent Civil Rights movement was primarily a crisis for two classes—for the U.S. bourgeoisie and the Black petty-bourgeoisie. In response to the threat of liberation war, the U.S. Empire drew the colonial petty-bourgeoisie closer to itself as a shield while enacting a revamped neo-colonial program to pacify the masses. Civil Rights became the U.S. Government’s official pacification program, while the hollow shell of the dying Civil Rights movement was itself taken over by U.S. imperialism to be used against the deeper anti-colonial rebellion.

They don't say that it's specifically nonviolence that is the problem. It's the wilful participation within a neo-colonial program, which employed a specific form of hegemonic nonviolence.

He also cites Mumia Abu-Jamal, but here's a fun pattern: He cites a lot of things at the beginning of chapters and then doesn't analyse its position within the text and/or in relation to his own point. Here's the quote he pulls from Mumia's We Want Freedom:

The roots of armed resistance run deep in African American history. Only those who ignore this fact see the Black Panther Party as somehow foreign to our common historical inheritance.

Later on, he says:

Many forces converged to bring about the organization bearing the name of the Black Panther Party. One of them, of course, was the powerful psychological and social force of history. In the 60s, many books began to emerge on the theme of Black history. Long-forgotten or little-mentioned figures began to come to life to a generation that, having not grown up in segregated educational environments, was less familiar with the historical currents underlying Black life.

And after that Mumia goes on to describe how “the smoldering embers of Watts,” which was burnt “just one year before the Black Panther Party's formation,” had been front and center in the “bright minds of Huey and Bobby.” He's not just documenting a history; he's weaving the threads to show that what happened in Watts led all the way to radicalising MLK. But it's not only that; he's doing it to also highlight how an understanding of 'riot' can “prove misleading by masking the objectives of mass violence.”

Peter uses none of this, even though the rest of the chapter would easily lend itself to a discussion about nonviolence. But it's also not the conversation Peter would want; Mumia later says, after quoting from The Philadelphia Bulletin:

Order, to the editors of the Philadelphia daily, meant legal support for slavery; any who would resist that evil, even ex-slaves themselves, were branded “enemies of order.”

Mumia was not focusing only on debating violence versus nonviolence; he was focusing on how abolition was demonised as “violent” because people were fighting for their freedom. Again, those are not the same arguments.

Like, I don't know, if Peter read towards Chapter 7 of Mumia's book (“A Woman's Story”), he'd also have some understanding that nonviolent action is a necessity as part of the movement. Mumia quotes Frankye Malika Adams and then makes the following observation:

Adams’s insights reveal a perspective that reflects what every Panther actually experienced daily, feeding thousands of Black schoolchildren across the nation, providing free medical services to the ghetto poor, in some cities offering free shoes and clothing to people, and the like. Armed conflict, despite its salience in press reports, was actually a rare occurrence.

I have to wonder why the focus Peter makes is on nonviolence protecting the state rather than what actually protects the state (and then doesn't even explain what that means to him in the first chapter)... which are collaborators and people with designs on power, people ambivalent to the colonial and imperial projects, and those who've imbibed the propaganda that has been crafted by the state to pacify them (which is far more indicting and is actually part of the conversations that both Mumia and Tani and Sera are having).

Anyway, Peter then goes on to say this:

A month and a day later, President Kennedy was calling for Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act, ending several years of a strategy to stall the civil rights movement.

Citing a quote of MLK that appears in Tani and Sera's work as a footnote for this section. In the context of their book, that quote looks like this:

The Birmingham rebellion absolutely convinced the government that even larger reforms were needed to dampen the fires of revolt. As King said: “The sound of the explosion in Birmingham reached all the way to Washington.” On June 11, 1963 President Kennedy, addressing the Empire, called for Congress to pass the now-historic Civil Rights Act. The failure of the non-violent Civil Rights movement and the spreading breakout of anti-colonial struggle by the New Afrikan masses, forced the imperialist government and the Black petty-bourgeois protest leaders to wake up and admit how much they needed each other, to back each other up. This was the true meaning of the March on Washington, which on August 28, 1963 brought 250,000 persons to Washington as a pacified backdrop for King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.

Emphasis mine. Their critique is not purely on nonviolence (it is an element, and it is mostly an adjective); their critique is primarily on the connection of the petty bourgeois Black protest leaders (many of whom, if you connect the dots, would be seen attempting varying levels of government positions) and the imperialist US government. Their critique is largely on how these people were working together to undermine a movement (which involved multiple and diverse strategies).

Once again, in favour of a catchy title (from someone who gets mad at people using catchy slogans like KYLR and claims it's because they're too hard for people to understand), he has managed to argue the wrong point when discussing their ineffectiveness.

Book: Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America Chapters: A Debate Revisited / On Ward Churchill's “Pacifism as Pathology” Author: Michael Ryan Published: 2017 / PM Press

I have little to say on this essay (written in 2016), but I have to wonder why the updates these old men keep making include varying degrees of misogyny. This is footnote 6 in 'A Debate Revisited':

In these heady days of irritatingly diversionary and pointless political correctness, it behooves me stress that I have nothing against either mothers or people who fuck them.

I mean, I don't have to wonder. It's also perplexing because they actually somewhat engaged with feminist understandings and critiques, only to... later blow them off? (Honestly, if they say nothing about their frustrations for political correctness, they would fare better because no one would pay attention for that.)

I also just don't understand his vision of what the world was then. I don't want to quote that section, but I just don't get where he was.

---

In 'On Ward Churchill':

One such deformation is the increasing tendency for arrest and the presumed incumbent publicity to become ends unto themselves. Within this framework, the number of arrests one has amassed becomes the proof of one’s revolutionary commitment and credentials. This process, particularly rampant among men, where civil disobedience becomes a form of nonviolent machismo, is appropriately described by Judy Costello: “I believe in noncooperation and civil disobedience, but in practice I have seen men use these tools as weapons—seeing who can suffer the most, counting up jail records, feeding on the glory of being able to suffer more.”

Clearly, we recognize the right of women to respond to physical and psychological aggression using whatever means are necessary, up to and including armed or violent self-defense or retaliation.

Just some interesting things that appear in the book where Ward Churchill's essay is. No idea why they could be important for something else. [/sarcasm]

Book: Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America Chapter: Pacifism as Pathology: Notes on an American Pseudopraxis Author: Ward Churchill Published: 2017 / PM Press

This essay was originally published in 1986.

In relation to another book (which Ward likes, but I think it's because of how easy it is to read your own understanding into it), it's kind of easy to see where it came from upon reading this essay. It's got the provocative vibes, but it feels like they're better utilised in the structure of this essay.

I don’t deny the obviously admirable emotional content of the pacifist perspective. Surely we can all agree that the world should become a place of cooperation, peace, and harmony. Indeed, it would be nice if everything would just get better while nobody got hurt, including the oppressor who (temporarily and misguidedly) makes everything bad. Emotional niceties, however, do not render a viable politics. As with most delusions designed to avoid rather than confront unpleasant truths (Lenin’s premise that the sort of state he created would wither away under “correct conditions” comes to mind), the pacifist fantasy is inevitably doomed to failure by circumstance.

While also disagreeing with pacifism, it does this. It places the desire for it within a context of being understood while the author recognises that they view it as a delusion.

I also don't disagree with Churchill here. It would be nice if we could all just get along and make all this pain go away, but the people inflicting that pain don't want to stop because they benefit from it. We have to fight in whatever ways we can. But I do think it's interesting that, while there are people who try to coerce pacifism on others (“coercive pacifism” would've been a useful phrase), the conflation of nonviolence (undefined in most places) with coercive pacifism remains an issue.

Will that be an issue for the rest of this essay? We'll see.

I do need to say, though, that this essay is so far worse (not terrible) for not having included the context that was written in the 2016 introduction. Having that context, it's easier to position myself within what's being discussed. But if I read this essay as is, that lack of context still makes aspects of this feel... like he's conflating things. (But it's also still way better than something else, and the format is uh... Well, I see where someone got his structure, and I guess Ward isn't bothered by that.)

Bettelheim describes this inertia, which he considers the basis for Jewish passivity in the face of genocide, as being grounded in a profound desire for “business as usual,” the following of rules, the need to not accept reality or to act upon it. Manifested in the irrational belief that in remaining “reasonable and responsible,” unobtrusively resisting by continuing “normal” day-to-day activities proscribed by the nazis through the Nuremberg Laws and other infamous legislation, and “not alienating anyone,” this attitude implied that a more or less humane Jewish policy might be morally imposed upon the nazi state by Jewish pacifism itself.

I'm not going to comment on this section as a whole. It's discussing the role of Jewish passivity in the Holocaust (and does have some interesting footnotes that I'd like to look into more later—many of them are Jewish people who are commenting on the action that Jewish people took; for my own notes, there's also a footnote showing that this essay was sent off, even in the 80s, to be read by different Jewish groups). As a note, part of why I'm not going to comment on that section is that I feel ill-equipped to do so; I don't know many of the references that are used.

However, I'm putting this near-final paragraph of the section here because it reminds me... deeply of things I've been watching now in 2026. And it's also not only of the people actively being oppressed but also people who view themselves as being on the side of the oppressed. The persistent desire of “returning to normal.” The constant push to be “reasonable” or “responsible” in the face of people who are neither reasonable nor responsible but control our lives on so many levels... You could swap out some terms, and a lot of the same feelings would still exist.

Hence, while the Mahatma and his followers were able to remain “pure,” their victory was contingent upon others physically gutting their opponents for them.

I'm dropping this line here because this is a critique that I have made repeatedly, in response to something that (somehow) Ward sees as good... Because it's a critique that Ward makes (and it's a correct one) that someone else just glides right over because he's not looking at how coercive pacifism or coercive nonviolence operates as a mechanism to silence and remove dissent.

I'd even go so far as to highlight something Ward says about dichotomies prior to this line:

Proponents of nonviolent political “praxis” are inherently placed in the position of claiming to meet the armed might of the state via an asserted moral superiority attached to the renunciation of arms and physical violence altogether. It follows that the state has demonstrated, a priori, its fundamental immorality/illegitimacy by arming itself in the first place. A certain psychological correlation is typically offered wherein the “good” and “positive” social vision (Eros) held by the pacifist opposition is posed against the “bad” or “negative” realities (Thanatos) evidenced by the state. The correlation lends itself readily to “good versus evil” dichotomies, fostering a view of social conflict as a morality play.

and also:

There can be no question but that there is a superficial logic to the analytical equation thus established. The Jews in their disarmed and passive resistance to German oppression during the 1930s and ’40s were certainly “good”; the nazis—as well armed as any group in history up to that point—might undoubtedly be assessed as a force of unmitigated “evil.” Such binary correlations might also be extended to describe other sets of historical forces: Gandhi’s Indian Union (good) versus troops of the British Empire (evil) and Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent Civil Rights Movement (good) versus a host of Klansmen and Southern cracker police (evil) offer ready examples.

In each case, the difference between them can be (and often is) attributed to the relative willingness/unwillingness of the opposing sides to engage in violence. And, in each case, it can be (and has been) argued that good ultimately overcame the evil it confronted, achieving political gains and at least temporarily dissipating a form of social violence. To the extent that Eichmann was eventually tried in Jerusalem for his part in the genocide of the Jewish people, that India has passed from the control of England, and that Mississippi blacks can now register to vote with comparative ease, it may be (and is) contended that there is a legacy of nonviolent political success informing the praxis of contemporary pacifism.

Neither of them (Ward or that other book) actually look at from where and from whom these narratives come from or how they pass on to others, which I think is detrimental to their argument. Ward is (or was) positioned within the academy, so I have to wonder if he saw how it was that the realm he existed in was part of the problem. As a teacher, it's hard not to notice that these exact structures are woven throughout everything we touch.

If someone spends any time at all with any history curriculum that children are exposed to over time, they will notice multiple things: It is incredibly sanitised and often removes hard discussions in favour of memorable facts; armed resistance is only acceptable in the face of another and perceived illegitimate state (in the US, this is why we're able to talk about the 'American Revolution' in a positive light without actually engaging with who was fighting and why they were fighting; this is applicable on a wider scale, but those moments of armed resistance are different depending on nation); the chosen “historical figures” that represent a moment and how they are positioned (e.g., MLK and Malcolm X and their common framings, particularly as being almost entirely oppositional and the former having “done things correctly” now that the dust has settled).

These lessons perpetuate in very hierarchical ways, and that needs to be addressed. Ward mostly does it (in what is feeling more round-about), but it still defaults to generic pacifists rather than focusing on the way that hierarchies want for people to be complacent and try to teach that complacency.

Walk into a church. The clergy doesn't want to be challenged or met with brutal take downs (hell, they can barely handle polite yet verbose challenges), thus many of the lessons people learn there? Reinforce some elements of passivity.

I think, also, they'd have to challenge all hierarchies to recognise how they all reinforce and encourages degrees of passivity, especially in light of how people challenging them are treated and the expectations of decorum by the oppressor class. (Which fits that above dichotomy.)

Although the effectiveness of their tactics is open to question, their courage and integrity certainly are not.

This comes after discussing Thích Quảng Đức (the Buddhist monk who immolated himself in Saigon in 1963), the Buddhist monks who followed suit, and also Norman Morrison (a US Quaker who immolated himself in front of the Pentagon in 1965).

Something I can appreciate about this essay is that, in challenging the effectiveness of the pacifist blue prints that he engages with, he still shows a degree of empathy and understanding for the people themselves. (And also, the fact that there's analysis of the events being described helps, too. It shows that empathy isn't just verbiage but is part of having either done the work of research or actually talking to people.)

The list of principled and self-sacrificing pacifists and pacifist acts could undoubtedly be extended and, ineffectual or not, these people are admirable in their own right. Unfortunately, they represent the exception rather than the rule of pacifist performance in the United States. For every example of serious and committed pacifist activism emerging from the normative mass of American nonviolent movements since 1965, one could cite scores of countering instances in which only lip service was paid to the ideals of action and self-sacrifice.

This also makes it clear that Churchill has engaged with this topic (along with previous paragraphs). He has shown he has engaged with that history in some fashion and that he is attempting to show that not all pacifism is the same.

The question central to the emergence and maintenance of nonviolence as the oppositional foundation of American activism has not been the truly pacifist formulation, “How can we forge a revolutionary politics within which we can avoid inflicting violence on others?” On the contrary, a more accurate guiding question has been, “What sort of politics might I engage in which will both allow me to posture as a progressive and allow me to avoid incurring harm to myself?”

Even this highlights that pacifist movements have been co-opted by someone or with another purpose in mind.

Is such an assessment too harsh? One need only attend a mass demonstration (ostensibly directed against the policies of the state) in any U.S. city to discover the answer. One will find hundreds, sometimes thousands, assembled in orderly fashion, listening to selected speakers calling for an end to this or that aspect of lethal state activity, carrying signs “demanding” the same thing, welcoming singers who enunciate lyrically on the worthiness of the demonstrators’ agenda, as well as the plight of the various victims they are there to “defend,” and—typically—the whole thing is quietly disbanded with exhortations to the assembled to “keep working” on the matter and to please sign a petition or write letters to legislators requesting that they alter or abandon offending undertakings.

Throughout the whole charade it will be noticed that the state is represented by a uniformed police presence keeping a discreet distance and not interfering with the activities. And why should they? The organizers of the demonstration will have gone through “proper channels” to obtain permits required by the state and instructions as to where they will be allowed to assemble, how long they will be allowed to stay and, should a march be involved in the demonstration, along which routes they will be allowed to walk.

Surrounding the larger mass of demonstrators can be seen others—an elite. Adorned with green (or white or powder blue) armbands, their function is to ensure that demonstrators remain “responsible,” not deviating from the state-sanctioned plan of protest. Individuals or small groups who attempt to spin off from the main body, entering areas to which the state has denied access (or some other unapproved activity) are headed off by these armbanded “marshals” who argue—pointing to the nearby police—that “troublemaking” will only “exacerbate an already tense situation” and “provoke violence,” thereby “alienating those we are attempting to reach.”

I just wanted to put these three paragraphs here because I feel them on such a visceral level, even without being in the US.

Precisely. The preoccupation with avoiding actions that might “provoke violence” is thus not based on a sincere belief that violence will, or even can, truly be avoided. Pacifists, no less than their nonpacifist counterparts, are quite aware that violence already exists as an integral component in the execution of state policies and requires no provocation; this is a formative basis of their doctrine. What is at issue then cannot be a valid attempt to stave off or even minimize violence per se. Instead, it can only be a conscious effort not to refocus state violence in such a way that it would directly impact American pacifists themselves. This is true even when it can be shown that the tactics which could trigger such a refocusing might in themselves alleviate a real measure of the much more massive state-inflicted violence occurring elsewhere; better that another 100,000 Indochinese peasants perish under a hail of cluster bombs and napalm than America’s principled progressives suffer real physical pain while rendering their government’s actions impracticable.

Again, something that I feel very viscerally because it is something that keeps happening.

However...

We are left with a husk of opposition, a ritual form capable of affording a maudlin “I’m OK, you’re OK” satisfaction to its subscribers at a psychic level but utterly useless in terms of transforming the power relations perpetuating systemic global violence. Such a defect can, however, be readily sublimated within the aggregate comfort zone produced by the continuation of North American business as usual; those who remain within the parameters of nondisruptive dissent allowed by the state, their symbolic duty to the victims of U.S. policy done (and with the bases of state power wholly unchallenged), can devote themselves to the prefiguration of the revolutionary future society with which they proclaim they will replace the present social order (having, no doubt, persuaded the state to overthrow itself through the moral force of their arguments). Here, concrete activities such as sexual experimentation, refinement of musical/artistic tastes, development of various meat-free diets, getting in touch with one’s “id” through meditation and ingestion of hallucinogens, alteration of sex-based distribution of household chores, and waging campaigns against such “bourgeois vices” as smoking tobacco become the signifiers of “correct politics” or even “revolutionary practice.” This is as opposed to the active and effective confrontation of state power.

Bold is mine because I think he didn't quite recognise something and their connections. So let's actually break down the things he's mentioning and how they exist or have been viewed:

“Sexual experimentation” feels like a way of discussing too many topics (queerness, feminism, health, nuclear family). This is particularly interesting as this was written in 1986, in the middle of the AIDS pandemic within the United States (and elsewhere). But it's also not only something that was ever focused on queerness because sexual freedom was not something that all people had, along with all the things that came with that. Recognising the positioning of movements around sex (including the ability to safely have it, the ability to choose when or if to conceive, the ability to have it with whomever you wanted with the consent of all involved, the ability to exist within different forms of relationships, etc)... Are all things that were always in confrontation with state power. They're not just “signifiers” of correct politics (I'm sure even in the 1980s, this should've been clear). Are there people who use it as such? Of course, but that's true of every movement and every fight.

“Refinement of musical/artistic tastes” is a hobby that people have always engaged in. This just feels like a weird denigration of art (when there is a very real critique of hyperfocusing on art in lieu of doing anything).

“Development of various meat-free diets” is very obviously a nod at vegetarianism and veganism, and both of these are... also tied to an international structure (even more so now than in the 1980s, but it should've been somewhat apparent then, too). While the 1970s were pretty good for US agricultural exports, the 1980s were not. This was also true of meat-related exports. Again, are there people who weaponise their personal diets to bludgeon people with them as a signifier of their moral superiority? Yes, but they're not the majority.

“Getting in touch with one's 'id' through meditation and ingestion of hallucinogens” is very obviously a reference to drugs. This one can have a whole range of critique because it just sounds like someone is angry at people doing new age nonsense. There's a ton of political issues around drugs that can be dealt with, but if we're going to go down the road of critiquing those “getting in touch with their 'id',” then a specific critique of how the new age spiritual 'movements' often undermined others would be useful.

“Alteration of sex-based distribution of household chores” is a hit at feminism, and an interesting one when you realise how often women were sidelined in a ton of movements because they still had to do the work that men wouldn't (and sometimes still won't) do... because they keep shoving women into care work so they can be on the street.

“Waging campaigns against such 'bourgeois vices' as smoking tobacco” is interesting considering all that we know about Philip-Morris. And while a lot of this came out after 1985, a lot of it did not.

I'm not sure why Churchill decided to add that bit because it does nothing useful to the rest of the content, which was at least mostly thought-provoking (if not entirely agreeable). Especially when followed with this:

Small wonder that North America’s ghetto, barrio, and reservation populations, along with the bulk of the white working class—people who are by and large structurally denied access to the comfort zone (both in material terms and in a corresponding inability to avoid the imposition of a relatively high degree of systemic violence)—tend either to stand aside in bemused incomprehension of such politics or to react with outright hostility.

But a lot of the above resonated with people who weren't middle-class. The “alteration of sex-based distribution of household chores” was something that a lot of poor rural folks also could understand as being necessary, especially when women were expected to do the majority of the care work on top of doing everything else they had to do.

A lot of those weren't about “being in the comfort zone” but were explicit acknowledgements of areas in which life could be better, and not everyone making those critiques (as I outlined above) was white or middle-class. Maybe this bit would come out better if he didn't try to 'those bourgeois politics of ~niche~ things I don't get' immediately right before it. (Granted, I also know I have the benefit of foresight after 1986, but it should also have been easy then to see how the things he denigrated had serious counterparts and played a role in both domestic and foreign policy and a person's ability to personally participate in resistance struggles.)

I think I also need to point out that Kathleen Cleaver has stated how the BPP enabled more opportunity for women than other contemporary activist groups did, especially white ones. Black women in the BPP may have still faced significant challenges as a result of gender, but people like Cleaver say that this was over-exaggerated because many women were taking on leadership roles and running the day-to-day programs. So actually, that “alteration of sex-based gender roles” would've enabled more people to be out in varying movements.

Of course, such a movement or perspective can hardly acknowledge that its track record in forcing substantive change upon the state has been an approximate zero. A chronicle of significant success must be offered, even where none exists. Equally, should such a movement or perspective seek hegemony of its particular vision—again, as American pacifism has been shown to do since 1965—a certain mythological complex is required to support its contentions. Generally speaking, both needs can be accommodated within a single unified propaganda structure.

NEW SECTION, so here we go. Since now it's a “single unified propaganda structure,” maybe I'll get the thing I said he didn't do (earlier).

And... This section does not. It doesn't match the connection of the so-called “pacifists” creating the propaganda networks to the institutions people are coerced to engage with throughout their lives.

It is immediately perplexing to confront the fact that many of North America’s most outspoken advocates of absolute domestic nonviolence when challenging state power have consistently aligned themselves with the most powerful expressions of armed resistance to the exercise of U.S. power abroad. Any roster of pacifist luminaries fitting this description would include not only David Dellinger, but Joan Baez, Benjamin Spock, A.J. Muste, Holly Near, Staughton Lynd, and Noam Chomsky as well.

FINALLY. A list of people! Also interesting to see AJ Muste on that list. At least he has made one of the elements I've highlighted clear, even if it is in relation to labour organising. (Beyond this, I never really looked into him, so I've got nothing.)

Noam Chomsky doesn't surprise me here, since he enjoys doing genocide denials (then Cambodia, later Bosnia). And we'd also later learn that he's fine co-existing with sex pests and traffickers, as he was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein.

The situation is all the more problematic when one considers that these leaders, each in his/her own way, also advocate their followers’ perpetual diversion into activities prefiguring the nature of a revolutionary society, the basis for which cannot be reasonably expected to appear through nonviolent tactics alone. This apparent paradox erodes a line of reasoning that, although it has probably never been precisely formulated within the North American nonviolent movement, seems likely to have informed the thinking of its more astute leadership. Its logical contours can be sketched as follows. Since at least as early as 1916, the importance of colonial and later neocolonial exploitation of the nonindustrialized world in maintaining modern capitalist states has been increasingly well understood by the revolutionary opposition within those states. Today, it is widely held that removal of neocolonial sources of material and superprofits would irrevocably under-cut the viability of late capitalist states.

Still true today, honestly.

The function of “responsible” oppositional leadership in the mother country—as opposed to the “irresponsible” variety that might precipitate some measure of armed resistance from within before the Third World has bled itself in diminishing state power from without (and who might even go so far as to suggest whites could directly participate)—is first and foremost to link the mother country movement’s inaction symbolically and rhetorically to Third World liberation struggles. The blatant accommodation to state power involved in this is rationalized (both to the Third Worlders and to the movement rank-and-file) by professions of personal and principled pacifism, as well as in the need for “working models” of nonviolent behavior in postrevolutionary society.

Can't we just point to schools, the academy, NGOs, political parties, governments... I mean, that's what's being talked about here, and that's not necessarily “pacifism.” It's coercive pacifism or hegemonic pacifism, but it's not the totality of pacifism (as Churchill already states).

It's also not even that these people are necessarily pacifists; it's that they adopt the guise of pacifism (or act it publicly) and weaponise those values for their own personal benefit. It's part of the maintenance of the desired (by them) hierarchy and of their own positions of power, with the goal to stay at that position or access more.

The political expression of pacifism confronts us with what may be analogously described as a (mass) pathology.

I think 'pathology' is actually the wrong analogy, and I've been getting that feeling from the very beginning. It's more of a religion than a disease, though I understand why someone would prefer the analogy to a disease over religion.

He does recognise this, to an extent, too. Prior to this, he said:

Codification of essentially religious symbology and mythology as the basis for political ideology is not lacking in precedent and has been effectively analyzed elsewhere.

But I don't see the 'pathological' aspect here. Almost everything I've seen described has reminded me, in many aspects, of a fundamentalist religion. Or a cult. Neither of which are 'diseases' and do rely on an excruciating amount of propaganda both by the top and from within.

He also utilises this aspect to say that there are 'symptoms', but I'm not fond of the 'racism as pathology' analogy either:

Racism itself has been accurately defined as a pathology.

I think pathologising things is a bad idea, and I think it helps people to find ways to opt out of taking responsibility for their own participation (whether they intended to or not).

Anyway, he says that pacificism can be diagnosable because: Pacifism is delusional, racist, and suicidal. I don't think this makes for a good enough analogy, and I think people are better off comparing coercive pacifism to the varying religions and cults that surround us. The comparison would've been far better and still capable of making those points (and also better able to encompass the existence of a “comfort zone” for white people that he keeps bringing up).

He quotes Blase Bonpane, who says:

Unfortunately, we have been brought up on parlor games, where the participants discuss whether or not they are “for” or “against” violence. Can you picture a similar discussion on whether we are for or against disease? Violence, class struggle, and disease are all real. They do not go away through mystification…. Those who deny the reality of violence and class struggle—like those who deny the reality of disease—are not dealing with the real world.

And I have to wonder what the context of that quote is (I am not doing another book rabbit-hole at this moment, for I will go insane), but the first sentence is precisely pointing at part of the problem for why coercive pacifism and coercive nonviolence exist. “We have been brought up on parlor games” just reminds me of all the lessons we learned from everyone around us, and many of us learned these lessons from the same places: institutions we were forced to participate in.

However, as with any pathologically based manifestation, hegemonic pacifism in advanced capitalist contexts proves itself supremely resistant—indeed, virtually impervious—to mere logic and moral suasion. The standard accouterments (such as intelligent theoretical dialogue) of political consciousness raising/movement building have proven relatively useless when confronted within the cynically self-congratulatory obstinacy with which the ideologues of pacifist absolutism defend their faith.

Even he keeps flipping between the 'patholgy' and 'religion' analogy. I would've stuck with the latter.

What follows, then, is a sketch of a strategy by which radical therapists might begin to work through the pacifist problematic in both individual and group settings. It should be noted that the suggested method of approach is contingent upon the therapist’s own freedom from contamination with pacifist predilections (it has been my experience that a number of supposed radical therapists are themselves in acute need of therapy in this area). It should also be noted that in the process of elaboration a number of terms from present psychological jargon (e.g., “reality therapy”) are simply appropriated for their use value rather than through any formal adherence to the precepts which led to their initial currency. Such instances should be self-explanatory.

Therapy may be perceived as progressing either through a series of related and overlapping stages or phases of indeterminate length.

If I didn't have the context from the 2016 introduction, this would've felt like it came absolutely out of left field. I wonder how many people who've read this didn't have that context.

I'm also... not a fan of the further framing of therapy because it makes a lot of assumptions of what have to happen, but I can see echos of someone else's later thoughts about Therapy Works (for Abusers) mixed within. This kind of hinders the whole revolutionary aspect, I think, because it still relies upon the hierarchical structures; it's a top-down approach to 'fixing' something that was already top-down applied.

Demystification. It has been my experience that, by this point in the therapeutic process, there are few (if any) remaining participants seeking to extend the principles of pacifist absolutism. And among remaining participants—especially among those who began with such absolutist notions—there often remains a profound lack of practical insight into the technologies and techniques common to both physical repression and physical resistance.

I actually think the 'demystification' element of tools that may be used in revolutionary struggle is good. I don't find the therapy aspect helpful, but giving people hands-on knowledge and engagement with the things they theoretically view as inherently bad is helpful.

I also think connecting this lack of personal engagement with these tools (something a lot of BPP members, rural folks, etc already had because they were tools that existed in their lives)... to the hierarchy that has enabled that disconnect? Would be helpful.

Book: Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America Chapter: Pacifism as Pathology Revisited: Excavating a Debate (Again) Author: Ward Churchill Published: 2017 / PM Press

This introduction was written in 2016.

I need to highlight this part of the 'backstory' because I think it highlights something that succeeds in explaining the core idea of what the (intentionally catchy and controversially named) essay means:

Perhaps obviously, it emerged from the cumulative frustration attending my years of activist experience from early 1969 onward, as the broadly insurgent movement in which I’d cut my proverbial teeth dissolved into the (euroamerican) left’s generalized “turn to theory,” the “new age” charade of self-absorbed indulgencies like “est,” and other such willful diversions, with what remained having largely harnessed itself to the self-neutralization embodied in catechistic rituals of “nonviolent protest.” As well, and as a fair number of readers correctly surmised from almost the moment the essay first appeared in print, there was something much more specific that prompted me to write it.

The incident in question occurred when I accepted an invitation from Bob Sipe, an organizer of the Midwest Radical Therapy Association (MRTA), to conduct a workshop at the group’s 1981 annual conference, held near Boone, Iowa. The premise underlying my session was that many people on the left displayed an irrational aversion to firearms based upon an abject ignorance of—and consequent intimidation by—the technology itself. Worse, they were intent on glossing over this experiential skills deficiency by proclaiming such weakness to be both a “moral virtue” and a constructive political dynamic. To my mind, and Bob’s, this translated into a posture of deliberate self-disempowerment on the part of oppositionists, the only possible result of which would be a virtual monopolization of firepower by the very institutional/ideological status quo we radicals were supposedly committed to abolishing. To call such practice self-defeating was and is to dramatically understate the case.

Whether someone agrees with Ward here or not, this positions his essay within a specific context of what he would be discussing with regards to “pacifists.” It isn't vague, it isn't meandering; he's very clear in explaining something that sparked his frustration with concepts of “nonviolence” and “pacifism,” which helps us better understand the direction he was aiming.

I don't know (yet) if he does this in the original essay, but his introduction does a beautiful job of making it very clear what kind of pacifism I'm supposed to understand him to be critiquing.

You’d think, given this sort of favorable response, that similar exercises in demystification/personal empowerment might’ve been embraced by the MRTA as a whole. Instead, it seems I’d barely left the conference grounds en route back to Colorado before one of RT’s leading lights, Claude Steiner, demanded an “emergency plenary meeting.” When it was convened that evening, he advanced a resolution for ratification by the membership prohibiting such workshops from ever again being conducted under the organization’s auspices and barring anyone from bringing a firearm, whether real or simulated, to a conference for any purpose. The quality of the ensuing “discussion” can perhaps be gleaned from Steiner’s bald assertion that I was “a killer” who had “absolutely no place in the RT community,” and his response, when challenged to muster evidence of my homicidal propensities, that he’d “seen it in [my] eyes.”

This part continues into a discussion about personal attacks that have no basis in evidence (and is presented as such—I know nothing of Ward Churchill, and I'm not going to presume anything about him at this time). This again is a very good way of centering how I'm supposed to understand this essay, and it also does a good job in another area that is more appropriate than a straight conflation of all nonviolence: He provides the audience a specific example to understand and expand from.

If this is what motivated him to write his original essay, then it is a clear explanation as to what his terminology means. We can see that he means the 'nonviolence' as imposed by people who seek to retain their own positions of power, whether it is on a small- or large-scale.

Side note: I kind of love the mention of feminist lesbians who had admitted they came to denounce the whole thing as a macho exercise and then were like “Actually, this was good, and I want more of it.” I grew up around varying kinds of weaponry, learned how to use them, and I actually would like more places to 'demystify' them for most people so they can better understand their uses in varying contexts. (Also, this anecdote doesn't feel like the traditionally hostile-towards-feminists thing, nor does it make them feel like they were treated as idiots; it genuinely feels amusing to me and like something people I know would've done.)

Side note to the side note: I did say I loved it, but after the later discussed “lest I be accused” comment, I find I have questions of its inclusion.

Suffice it to say that, although no one who’d actually attended the workshop voted in favor of it, Steiner’s resolution was passed by a decisive margin. As if this weren’t bad enough, a question was then posed by one of those who’d opposed the measure as to whether, should the cops show up at a future conference, those who’d voted in favor would be prepared to disarm or forcibly eject them. This caused a brief dither before an amendment was quickly mustered and ratified, exempting “police and other civil authorities”—e.g., the FBI—from the MRTA’s otherwise blanket ban on weaponry. For at least some of those present, this finally said it all, thoroughly validating a remark I’d made during the workshop Q&A to the effect that, in practice, the term “principled pacifist” can often translated as “active accommodationism,” and sometimes as “outright collaborator.”

Again, here is a clear example of what is meant. This is good positioning of the topic being discussed.

(Lest I be accused of “sexism” in my framing here, it should be noted that less than 2 percent of all those killed by police are female).

I don't like this inclusion because I think it needs to be framed better than this. It's not sexist to say that, under “official” capacity, police are more likely to kill more men (particularly men of colour) than they are women (though I'm curious what the percentage is now, if it was 2% in 2016).

However, it should included that police are more able to kill women outside of official capacity (sex workers, women they target in any way, partners), and those crimes are also less likely to be dealt with (women who report their abusive cop boyfriend to the police... don't stand a chance). It's not an either-or here; it's both. Women are far more likely to die to a cop outside of his “official” duties, and that only adds the argument being made because it shows that on top of their behaviour in “official” duties, they weaponise the same positions external to them.

And had he not made the “lest I be accused” thing, I wouldn't have actually had any thoughts on the presentation of information; I would've probably wondered “What about...” but it wouldn't have read as badly as it does. (Professor, are you scared of being ~cancelled~?)

As concerns the current scene, Peter Gelderloos, from his station in “the younger generation” and in his own inimitable fashion, has said much of what I might’ve said regarding the stultifying stranglehold exerted by proponents purely “peaceful protest”...

Full offense, but Peter's book is a meandering mess that does little to define his meaning. If you get something from it, I guess cool? But also, it's literally written in a way that you bring your own definitions to it and he does nothing to get you on the same page. (Meanwhile, while I'm not liking Churchill that much? Especially after the pre-emptive “lest I be” nonsense... and also the intro, which I didn't comment on... Churchill does at least organise his essays in a way that forces the reader to understand what his meaning is.)

Anyway, skimming through the footnotes for any interesting bits:

-11-. “I advocate training in arms [because] non-violence presupposes the ability to strike [emphasis added],” the Mahatma observed, adding that, “Taking life may be a duty,” and that, “Even man-slaughter may be necessary in certain cases.” See Krishna Kripalani, ed., All Men Are Brothers: Life and Thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi as Told in His Own Words (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1960) pp. 121, 134, 138.

If anything, something like this is interesting because it shows that even a person whose “nonviolent movement” included contextually necessary violence. Just noting it for some reason.

-16-. The consistency reflected in Black’s lengthy record of relying upon character assassination, often to the extent of outright snitch-jacketing, as an expedient means of “winning” theoretical disputes is truly remarkable. That he is himself a documented snitch, yet is still accorded a certain degree of respect by people who should know better, is even more so. Instructively, his smears are often quite popular on right-wing blogs like Discover the Networks and David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine. See, e.g., Bob Black, “Up Sand Creek Without a Paddle,” FrontPage Magazine (November 2006), now online at discoverthenetworks.org. A February 21, 1996, informant letter sent by Black to the Seattle police is posted online at seesharppress.com. For an attempt to excuse his conduct, even while acknowledging it, see Anonymous [Aragorn], “In Defense of Bob Black,” Anarchist News (September 21, 2015), online at anarchistnews.org.

This is just the funniest one, honestly, especially as it implicates both Bob Black and Aragorn in either being a certifiable snitch or laundering one in a movement. The Bob Black piece that is mentioned is no longer available where it's linked in the above (but I'm leaving the domain it was listed on when this edition of Churchill's book was published). It took some hunting, but I archived it here and it is super white supremacist (so please take care if you choose to read it). Like, it is appalling. (It's also uploaded on his academia.edu, but I refuse to make an account to download it there.)

The snitch letter is archived here.

Similarly, Aragorn's piece is no longer on anarchistnews.org (unless they've changed the structure of the site), but it is on TAL (archived here).

Idk, maybe we can get rid of Bob Black or (if you must engage with his bullshit) start contextualising his work by knowing exactly who he has always been.

I honestly wasn't expecting that when looking at what was in the citation, but wow.

Book: Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America Chapter: All Options: A Reintroduction to Pacifism as Pathology in Three Movements (Foreword) Author: Dylan Rodríguez Published: 2017 / PM Press

Prefacing this with: I found this book in the footnotes of someone else's. This was written in February 2016 (while some other essays were written in the 1980s and 1990s).

The common term for this condition of consent, of course, is “patriotism.” And therein—within and beyond the symbols, rhetorics, and institutional rituals and protocols of the patriotic American way of life—pulses a national schema that makes an absurdity of pacifism as anything other than an empty dream of moral gratification, utterly and emptily tethered to the moral platitudes and assumptive physical entitlements of white humanity.

Emphasis mine. This is actually a useful point in the discussion of pacifism's connection to the state. It doesn't wholesale deny pacifism's history (again, not all pacifist movements have worked in favour of the state or as pure pacifist movements but as part of and in tandem with larger movements), but it does actually engage with the fact that there is a national framework that “makes an absurdity” of it.

Pacifism is the opiate of the white activist world. Not to say that the rest of us are not sometimes seduced by the addictive dream of it as well, but there is little question that foregoing the tools of force—that is, to reject violent action absolutely and as a matter of moral principle—is accomplice to the reproduction of the long-running machineries (material, ideological, and paramilitary) of global white supremacy in all its variations.

While I don't agree entirely with this framing (because I think it misrepresents what pacifism is to many—there are a number of people who view themselves as largely pacifist until they are coerced otherwise or pacifists who still operate under their own morals but within wider networks to support others who may not share them; both of which don't inherently mean all of them reject violent action absolutely), I do at least appreciate that Dylan provides a specific point of reference for what he means by “pacifists” and how he perceives it.

This is a problem elsewhere.

My own incomplete extrapolation of the argument that follows: Ward Churchill clarifies how hegemonic (that is, compulsory) pacifism is an entitlement of white social life, a restoration of white supremacist order to the contemporary discourses of progressive social transformation, and an invitation to nonwhite “others” to adjoin themselves to a somewhat horrifying historical tradition of “bearing moral witness” to the programmatic and often indelible disruption of targeted peoples’ ways of being alive, together, autonomous, vulnerable, and often thriving in ways largely illegible and thus unacceptable to master narratives.

Hey, look. Someone else figured out how to specify a kind of pacifism and to critique it. “Hegemonic pacifism” or “compulsory pacifism” is a very good way of being able to understand the sort of pacifism that supports the state and does nothing to bring about any kind of change.

It is necessary to come to terms, then, with the damned “pacifist” that haunts your soul, wherever you are and however you identify. It is there because white life is a shared curse of the kind that gets some of us chanting in concert with people who are willing to tolerate our peculiarly planned obsolescence.

I just want to put this here because I find it an interesting and useful framing, and I like the mental imagery given by “peculiarly planned obsolescence.”

The fundamental contradiction, irreconcilable as it is fatal, is this: purely (that is, dogmatically) nonviolent moral appeals to state power, when animated by ordinary, vulnerable people’s desire to live free of the fear, physiological damage, and mourning wrought by racist and racist colonial state violence, actually reproduce the asymmetries of power and suffering on which the modern Western state form is based.

Once again, this is a better and more coherent explanation of which kind of nonviolence. By stating that it's a “dogmatically nonviolent moral appeal to state power,” it makes it very clear which kind of nonviolence we're discussing and how it can be harmful.

What, then, if pacifism facilitates the massive absorption of an oppressive violence that presents itself as a morally righteous force, executed for the sake of “peace,” “safety,” and “security”? Under such conditions of ideological and political antagonism, in which the contest of moral suasion is (even temporarily) won by the dominant regime, it may be the case that pacifism and nonviolence approximate amoral or potentially immoral positions that neither demystify nor remotely decelerate the machineries of destruction.

Something I find interesting about this essay is that it strikes very hard and very fast (it's well-written, cohesive, concise), but it occasionally makes these hedging sentences. It'll state something 'is' and does so repeatedly, but then it'll pull back and state that it 'may be the case'.

It kind of feels like they recognise this, have defined which kinds of pacifism, but then they've defaulted to generic 'pacifism' and feel like they have to kind of hedge their bets when they already had specific terminology laid out for use.

Of course, it must be reiterated that it is not necessarily the pacifist (person) who is the obstruction to (and potential opponent of) the surging collectives desiring radical—and immediate—transformation of an oppressive, human-instituted global order. The obstacle at stake is the central role played by pacifism (as ideology, pseudoreligion) in the ongoing mystification of a wretched global arrangement that pivots on the moral denigration, political dismissal, and active repression of resistances, revolts, and proto-revolutionary activities that transcend the prescriptions of nonviolence or “civil disobedience.”

I like the reckoning of hegemonic pacifism as a 'pseudoreligion'; that really does hammer home a good visual for where people learn it (the varying institutions and their hallowed rituals), how people learn it (very similarly to how they learn their religion's apparent tenets), the propaganda around it (similar to the texts for those tenets, which often is overlooked or rewritten to support them), and the ways in which people engage with them.

Book: How Nonviolence Protects the State Chapters: Introduction / Terminology Author: Peter Gelderloos Published: 2018(?) / Active Distribution & Detritus

Because I want to ensure my criticisms are accurate, I also hunted down the republished version of this book. It is probably pointless to have done so because... it's roughly the same other than a superficial attempt to address criticisms he likely received (I haven't looked for any, but if those were my first thoughts, I'm not going to be surprised when other people had similar thoughts).

Anyway, the introduction remains largely the same. The first four paragraphs are the “Introduction” and the Terminology part takes the rest of the Introduction and relabels it. It deletes the following sentence from the fifth paragraph:

We might say that the purpose of a conversation is to persuade and be persuaded, while the purpose of a debate is to win, and thus silence your opponent.

and also removes the following clause from the end of the same paragraph:

indicating how disempowered and delegitimized we are.

For some reason it combines three paragraphs and adds the word “And” to the front of the second one. Not sure why, as it worked better the way that it was before. It also adds more adverbs for some reason ('emphatically') and applies parentheticals to sentences when they were originally sentences on their own.

Another added bit is to say that something will be expounded upon in a future chapter, which is... hilarious to me. Academics do this, and I find it to be lazy writing. It's a way of saying “I've already addressed your criticism here,” but that can't be proven until I get to that section; I still don't understand why he wouldn't try to define terms or explain why he can't define them in a basic format. He's front-loaded other “criticisms” with a lot of preconceived negativity, but he hasn't done that for things that address his own argument.

Otherwise, there really aren't any changes. They're all minimal, and I don't understand why many of them were made because he still managed to not engage with the criticism of terminology. He dedicated a whole section to it but made no changes to the previous writing other than to rework sentences while changing no meaning.

Book: How Nonviolence Protects the State Chapter: Introduction Author: Peter Gelderloos Published: 2007 / South End Press

This book still gets traction almost two decades after its publication, and it doesn't seem like Peter's really updated any thoughts since then... So I figured, why not.

Because of the hegemony advocates of nonviolence exert, criticisms of nonviolence are excluded from the major periodicals, alternative media, and other forums accessed by anti-authoritarians. Nonviolence is maintained as an article of faith, and as a key to full inclusion within the movement. Anti-authoritarians and anti-capitalists who suggest or practice militancy suddenly find themselves abandoned by the same pacifists they’ve just marched with at the latest protest.

This is the second paragraph in the book, and it is jumping immediately into an argument without even defining what is meant (and even if later it does add “context,” that context is kind of wimpy). My two primary issues with this are:

1. How do you define “nonviolence” and what constitutes “nonviolent action” in the course of a resistance struggle?
2. How do you define “militancy” and what constitutes “militant behaviour” in the course of a resistance struggle?

Neither of these things are addressed prior to just jumping into the argument that nonviolent action is upheld and that militancy is looked down upon. (It's also a failure to engage with how nonviolence is used within, for example, non-white communities and how white Europeans might alter its framing... Much like Peter often does.)

In my experience, most people who are becoming involved with radical movements have never heard good arguments, or even bad ones, against nonviolence. This is true even when they already know a great deal about other movement issues. Instead, they tend to be acquainted with the aura of taboo that shrouds militants; to have internalized the fear and disdain the corporate media reserve for people willing to actually fight against capitalism and the state; and to have confused the isolation imposed on militants with some self-imposed isolation that must be inherent in militancy. Most proponents of nonviolence with whom I have discussed these issues, and these have been many, approached the conversation like it was a foregone conclusion that the use of violence in social movements was both wrong and self-defeating (at least if it occurred anywhere within 1,000 miles of them). On the contrary, there are a great many solid arguments against nonviolence that pacifists have simply failed to answer in their literature.

Here we have Peter building what effectively looks like a strawman (even though it's “in his experience”). Because we don't know, at this point in the introduction, what he means by “nonviolence” or “militancy,” we cannot accurately gauge what's being discussed. This is a problem in his communication and not our understanding; we're going to come to this with our own internal understandings of these two terms.

The other thing is that he's front-loading a lot of negativity without doing the work of explaining. What arguments have these people heard? What arguments should they be hearing? “In this book, I will...” isn't enough of because it just devolves into... more of the same as we've already heard in the first three paragraphs.

And considering I'm reading the “2nd edition,” I find it strange that he never addressed these kinds of arguments. If he had, it might make his argument stronger and more focused, but y'know.

This book will show that nonviolence, in its current manifestations, is based on falsified histories of struggle. It has implicit and explicit connections to white people’s manipulations of the struggles of people of color. Its methods are wrapped in authoritarian dynamics, and its results are harnessed to meet government objectives over popular objectives. It masks and even encourages patriarchal assumptions and power dynamics. Its strategic options invariably lead to dead ends. And its practitioners delude themselves on a number of key points.

Presumptuous claim to put up front. I know he's doing the edgy writer thing of front-loading without effort, to try to push you to want to read... But this kind of shit always pisses me off in every book.

Also, again, what is “nonviolence, in its current manifestations?” This presumes that the audience doesn't have ideas of what nonviolence are or that they share the exact same ideas of nonviolence as Peter does, and that's just silly.

And while he's not inherently wrong that some elements of how people understand nonviolence are due to the manipulations of history by white people, he's still not explaining what nonviolence even means so we don't know which manipulations of struggles or if Peter understands that a lot of struggles by people of colour used disruptive nonviolent tactics (e.g., Black people sitting at counters and blocking white customers). And if I view those tactics as nonviolent (because they are) and I recognise how they worked (because they did), then he and I cannot possibly share the same view of nonviolence.

Even if we're both white.

Oh, and another thing on this: This reads exactly like Peter trying to dress up his words in a veneer of truth. He's not wrong, but it also doesn't all add up to the generalisation of “nonviolence does nothing” or “nonviolence protects the state.” What he needs to do is point to specific framings of nonviolence, even in the introduction, to make those arguments. What he's doing here is lazy; he's taking true statements and weaving them into lazy writing. If I weren't reading this with another goal, if I were reading this by choice, this would've made me put it down because it just shows me that all I can expect is generalisiations to be made with no analysis of the framings I want to understand.

We might say that the purpose of a conversation is to persuade and be persuaded, while the purpose of a debate is to win, and thus silence your opponent. One of the first steps to success in any debate is to control the terminology to give oneself the advantage and put one’s opponents at a disadvantage. This is exactly what pacifists have done in phrasing the disagreement as nonviolence versus violence. Critics of nonviolence typically use this dichotomy, with which most of us fundamentally disagree, and push to expand the boundaries of nonviolence so that tactics we support, such as property destruction, may be accepted within a nonviolent framework, indicating how disempowered and delegitimized we are.

This feels like a pre-emptive “I will not define these terms because that's what they want me to do” entry, and I find it infuriating. It's also frustrating to see him doing a similar tactic in the conflation of pacificism and nonviolence, and it's even more interesting to see a lack of base engagement (it is an introduction, after all) with how people understand these terms.

Instead, it's just... harping on pacifists (which ones?) for controlling the terms of debate.

Also, are we going to actually consider that pacifists help the state when there were some pretty large-scale obstructive pacifist movements within many wars over time? This kind of conflation is unhelpful, and it also contributes similarly to the same kinds of movement history erasure that Peter complains about.

I will refer to proponents of nonviolence by their chosen nomenclature, as nonviolent activists or, interchangeably, pacifists. Many practitioners of such prefer one term or the other, and some even make a distinction between the two, but in my experience the distinctions are not consistent from one person to the next.

Where did they choose this? When did they choose this? Which ones chose this? I'm sorry, but this is just made up bullshit because there is a long history of pacifism, with the terminology being older than both he and I combined.

Also, he calls himself an anarchist, but I don't think he is because his values don't fit my understanding of anarchism (which is that it is fully liberatory and requires no celebrities who weaponise their clout, as he does). Meanwhile, a bunch of publishers are happy to let him say as much and support him. We all disagree. All ideologies and value systems have this problem, but you wouldn't just make a snap judgement because you want to use the terminology in ways that most people wouldn't.

A good example to understand this is when people fight over who is and isn't 'Christian'. Some Christians try to distance Christianity from other Christians who they think are wrong (“that isn't what Jesus would do, you're not a Christian!”). A lot of well-meaning Christians do this (which I find personally frustrating and very limiting for their own personal exploration). But the exploration should be less on the determination of who should be a Christian (they all are, they claim) and more on how it is that Christo-fascists and regular nice folks who take no shit can coexist within the same religion (and the latter needs to look at the history of their religion to do so). A lot of non-Christians do this nonsense, too, and I think it should again fall to understanding the history and trajectory of the common Christian faith(s).

It's kind of like... what Peter should do for pacifists. You can't just decide who is a pacifist because you decided they are rather than listening to them or what definition you like for it without actually engaging with the history of pacifism and understanding how it operates and how some people engage with it. That's actually necessary to building a critique, and that's supposedly the point.

At this point it might help to clearly define violence, but one of the critical arguments of this book is that violence cannot be clearly defined.

... Then the point of the book is moot, tbh. If you cannot bring me onto your page because we already have different understandings, you have failed.

(Similarly, in case anyone is still unclear: an anarchist is not someone who favors chaos but someone who favors the total liberation of the world through the abolition of capitalism, government, and all other forms of oppressive authority, to be replaced by any number of other social arrangements, proven or utopian.)

I 'favour' chaos, but that's because my understanding of chaos is not the same as that which is understood by common white supremacist society; while this isn't the point of the book, I think more people would benefit from exploring the ways in which order and chaos are neutral existences that need to exist in equilibrium (too much of one is not good). Chaos creates chances to innovate something new within greater amounts of freedom; order creates restrictions and constraints, which can also provide different pathways to development. Both are necessary, but too much of one is harmful.

Where's that in your anarchist definition?

Anyway, beyond his refusal to embrace chaos, the rest is fine.

I use [revolution] only because it has such long-standing favorable connotations, and because the more accurate alternative, liberation, is clumsy in its adjectival forms.

... But revolutionary already has a lot of connotations about being 'new', and it doesn't inherently imply freedom in the way that a word with 'liber' does? How is 'liberatory' clumsy? Just say you don't like a word and move on.

I asked you to define words, not be smug about them.

To reemphasize a crucial distinction: the criticisms in this book are not aimed at specific actions that do not exemplify violent behavior, such as a vigil that remains peaceful, nor are they aimed at individual activists who choose to dedicate themselves to non-combative work, such as healing or building strong community relationships. When I talk about pacifists and advocates of nonviolence, I am referring to those who would impose their ideology across the entire movement and dissuade other activists from militancy (including the use of violence), or who would not support other activists solely because of their militancy.

Okay, but like... Did you engage with any pacifist movements? Or are you basing this on the five people who got upset at an anti-Iraq war protest for saying not to break a window? Because most often, a lot of pacifists do not impose their own ideology on others (and many are pacifist-to-a-point, meaning that they will do their best to err towards pacifism but will fight back when necessary).

Also, a lot of pacifists are involved in those healing and building aspects of our movements specifically because they are pacifists and know that their best chances for fighting (or, technically, not fighting) in this fight is through creation and improvement.

This kind of reminds me of how Peter talks about vegans, if I'm honest.

Again, what is “militancy” here?

Though I focus on debunking pacifism in service of revolutionary goals, in this book I include quotes from pacifists working for limited reforms in addition to quotes from people working for total social transformation. At first, this may seem like I am building a straw-man argument; however, I include the words or actions of reformist pacifists only in reference to campaigns where they worked together closely with revolutionary pacifists and the quoted material has relevance to all involved, or in reference to social struggles cited as examples proving the effectiveness of nonviolence in achieving revolutionary ends.

Lmao, at the strawman bit. Yeah, it does because that's what you're doing, and you can see the evidence of it here. Prior to this paragraph, you have only used “nonviolent activists” and “pacifists” (and then said the two are interchangeable when they aren't because not all nonviolent activists are pacifists, just like how not all anti-militarist activists are pacifists—that's called “conflation”). Now, in this paragraph you suddenly remembered a term that would help narrow down the group you're speaking about: “reformist pacifists.”

Not all pacifists are reformists, but now you're conflating all pacifists with reformists.

Also, you cannot debunk something that provides alternative tactics if you (as you claimed earlier) want a 'diversity of tactics'. From earlier in the introduction:

I know of no activist, revolutionary, or theorist relevant to the movement today who advocates only the use of violent tactics and opposes any usage of tactics that could not be called violent. We are advocates of a diversity of tactics, meaning effective combinations drawn from a full range of tactics that might lead to liberation from all the components of this oppressive system: white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and the state.

(Also, this line gets me. “Relevant?” Who the fuck are you to decide who is relevant and who isn't? Shut the fuck up.)

Anyway, back to the paragraph about reformist pacifists, the following sentence (from the above quoted part) is this:

It is difficult to distinguish between revolutionary and non-revolutionary pacifists, because they themselves tend not to make that distinction in the course of their activity-they work together, attend protests together, and frequently use the same tactics at the same actions. Because shared commitment to nonviolence, and not shared commitment to a revolutionary goal, is the chief criterion for nonviolent activists in deciding whom to work with, those are the boundaries I will use in defining these criticisms.

Except it isn't difficult at all to distinguish between them. What this says to be is that you didn't make the effort to try. There's a whole fucking history of pacifism and different pacifist elements of movements. Did you read about it at all before you published this book twice?