Book: How Nonviolence Protects the State Chapter: Nonviolence is Racist Author: Peter Gelderloos Published: 2007 / South End Press personal tags: #HNvPtS
I had to take months off of reading this because I kept getting trapped in reading (sometimes better) sources that Peter used (and also misrepresented). For someone who gets a lot of praise for this book specifically to this day, it often feels like people... didn't bother reading it or didn't bother reading past it. Anyway...
I do not mean to exchange insults, and I use the epithet racist only after careful consideration. Nonviolence is an inherently privileged position in the modern context. Besides the fact that the typical pacifist is quite clearly white and middle class, pacifism as an ideology comes from a privileged context. It ignores that violence is already here; that violence is an unavoidable, structurally integral part of the current social hierarchy; and that it is people of color who are most affected by that violence. Pacifism assumes that white people who grew up in the suburbs with all their basic needs met can counsel oppressed people, many of whom are people of color, to suffer patiently under an inconceivably greater violence, until such time as the Great White Father is swayed by the movement’s demands or the pacifists achieve that legendary “critical mass.”
This opening paragraph annoys me because the first sentence is about nonviolence and then moves on to pacifism. One of the things that I do not like is this constant conflation between the two; in order to be nonviolent, you do not need to be pacifist. At least Ward Churchill said what he meant in the title of his essay; it's like Peter can't do that because then we'd know the entire first chapter is basically ripped straight from it.
I can say that I agree that, in many cases, pacifism does come from a largely privileged position. I don't think that it's a position that comes out of only white suburbs, though; if I were to think that, I'd have to revisit the previous chapter only to learn about Gandhi's specific form of pacifism and what it was actually designed to do (or, preferably, read better books critiquing Gandhi and/or discussing the history of both partition and independence in Indian, Bangladesh, and Pakistan).
Amusingly enough, I feel the need to point to later Gelderloos beliefs seem to support nonviolence as a means of handling abusers. He has spoken repeatedly against KYLR, he claims therapy heals abusers (despite all evidence to the contrary of it supporting abusers, especially if they're men—and he dogpiles people who know more than he does in the process of being incredibly wrong).
All of which is to say that there are valid critiques of nonviolence, but it should be clear (even in his own positions and behaviours) that nonviolence and pacifism are two separate things.
People of color in the internal colonies of the US cannot defend themselves against police brutality or expropriate the means of survival to free themselves from economic servitude. They must wait for enough people of color who have attained more economic privilege (the “house slaves” of Malcolm X’s analysis) and conscientious white people to gather together and hold hands and sing songs. Then, they believe, change will surely come. People in Latin America must suffer patiently, like true martyrs, while white activists in the US “bear witness” and write to Congress. People in Iraq must not fight back. Only if they remain civilians will their deaths be counted and mourned by white peace activists who will, one of these days, muster a protest large enough to stop the war. Indigenous people need to wait just a little longer (say, another 500 years) under the shadow of genocide, slowly dying off on marginal lands, until-well, they’re not a priority right now, so perhaps they need to organize a demonstration or two to win the attention and sympathy of the powerful. Or maybe they could go on strike, engage in Gandhian noncooperation? But wait-a majority of them are already unemployed, noncooperating, fully excluded from the functioning of the system.
Again, a lot of this isn't wrong, but I do feel like this is less a critique of pacifism itself and more a critique of liberalism and liberal democracy. Can we stop and ask from where these beliefs stem that these pacifists tend to believe and focus on? Because this sounds exactly like what you'd hear coming out of the mouths of politicians in most governments.
This point feels weak because it so obviously is intertwined with a violent institution that both peddles it and benefits from it, and Peter made no attempt to even connect the two at all.
Also, it's weird to see positive views on Gandhi who, in the previous chapter, caught a lot of criticism for his pacifism and its negative impacts on Indian independence.
Nonviolence declares that the American Indians could have fought off Columbus, George Washington, and all the other genocidal butchers with sit-ins; that Crazy Horse, by using violent resistance, became part of the cycle of violence, and was “as bad as” Custer.
This is just my snark, but he can recognise the nonsensical nature of this... and yet does abuse apologetics on the regular? Okay.
But also... No, nonviolence doesn't say that because nonviolence isn't the ideology. Pacifism is, and it keeps feeling really weird every time this sort of conflation happens. We have plenty of nonviolent means to resist, even if they are met with violence. Food distribution, community centers, gardens, etc... All of these are 'nonviolent', but they don't have to be pacifist.
Pacifists must know, at least subconsciously, that nonviolence is an absurdly privileged position, so they make frequent usage of race by taking activists of color out of their contexts and selectively using them as spokespersons for nonviolence.
Pair this with a line further down the paragraph:
Nelson Mandela was too, until it dawned on white pacifists that Mandela used nonviolence selectively, and that he actually was involved in liberation activities such as bombings and preparation for armed uprising.
So again, nonviolence isn't the problem that he keeps pointing to. There's no ideology of nonviolence, and nonviolent strategies still hold possibility and potential. The problem he's seeing is pacifism as an ideology, and he refuses to maintain that position by continually conflating the two. (This could have been easily solved if, for example, an editor for wherever this book has been published had explained to him what his rhetoric was doing. Or if he cared. I can't be bothered to pretend that he cared.)
For example, nonviolence cannot refuse to “recognize that it can only work for privileged people” because nonviolence is the strategy. Pacifists, however, can refuse to recognise that a hyper-focus on nonviolence (or nonviolent strategies) can only work for privileged people. It's like actually pointing fingers in the right directions would make for better arguments and less conflation between two things that are not the same.
I also love these footnotes for “evidence” because there's no real way to corroborate them. For the point on Mandela:
In one conversation I had with a pacifist Mandela was held up as an exemplary person of color and abandoned just as quickly when I mentioned Mandela’s embrace of armed struggle.
I can't corroborate this conversation with a pacifist and if it really happened or is Peter's version of a straw man. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. But it's a common structure of footnote throughout the book, and I did explore at least one of them because I could find the remaining sources (even if Peter removed them from updated books, like this argument he has with Spruce Houser).
Similarly, the footnote following it just has “Jack Gilroy, e-mail, January 23, 2006” at the beginning and then explains an entire listserv conversation. Its likelihood of being real is high, but I also find it interesting just how many of these more private things are being put up as the points to argue with (especially when there have always been very prominent examples happening even within anarchist book fairs that get written critiques that can be linked to and referenced).
There was another footnote that I wanted to discuss, but it kept getting too long and unwieldy for this post, so it's all here in this tangent.
In an internal memo, the FBI addresses the need to prevent the rise of a black “messiah” as part of its Counter Intelligence Program.
While I don't doubt this for a second, this is where a footnote would've been good for curious readers. On top of this, it could make the inclusion of Alex Haley (who has had charges of working with FBI/CIA assets to manufacture a narrative) very interesting. This is also part of why I think Marable's interview on Democracy Now! is strange; they talk about whether or not Haley knew the person he worked with (Alfred Balk? I think) was working with an intelligence agency. Marable says that he must've but that we have no evidence. This was said by Marable more than 20 years ago, btw.
I know that personally, despite being interested in history and taking advanced placement US history classes throughout my years in some of the better public schools in the nation, I graduated high school knowing little about Malcolm X, other than that he was an “extremist” black Muslim. However, as early as elementary school, I knew quite a bit about Martin Luther King Jr. To be fair, Malcolm X is as important, if not more important, a figure to the civil rights and black liberation movements as King. In subsequent years, my political education in progressive white circles failed to correct either the white-out of Malcolm X or the misleading hagiography of King. It was only upon reading in black activists’ writings of the importance of Malcolm X that I did the necessary research.
This is in a footnote discussing how white activists (“particularly those interested in minimizing the role of militant and armed struggle”) play active roles in the minimizing and erasure of the memory and history of Malcolm X. I find it interestting that he supposedly graduated knowing little about Malcolm X other than a made-for-white-TV narrative, while my white flight high school (it was part of a community that developed out of white flight from a nearby city) still managed to teach me about him (they did keep the narrative that MLK and Malcolm X hated each other, but they did outline who Malcolm X was and what he did). Maybe Virginia was behind Illinois in correcting the history? Because Peter's not that much older than me, and I graduated in the early 2000s.
Darren Parker, a black activist and consultant to grassroots groups whose criticisms have contributed to my own understanding of nonviolence, writes...
Finally, we get a name! Except, the footnote for what Darren writes: “Darren Parker, e-mail, July 10, 2004.” This is one of those things that I loath about Peter's work. Very rarely do we get anything of interest dropped that we could all access and engage with. If I simply look up Darren Parker today, I am led to Grey's Anatomy wikis and information. This doesn't help me to learn anything. While I'm glad he at least names a Black activist (something Peter rarely does unless they agree with him or can make his points for him, if we're honest with his breadth of writing across many platforms), it'd be nice to be able to engage with their work. I can't engage with a consultant I don't even know how to find. (If I try a search for “Darren Parker” and “Black activist,” I get this SF Chronicle article about a man who is deceased and worked for the Democratic Party's African American Caucus. Is this the same person? I'll never know!)
What Darren said isn't wrong (that the habit of quoting MLK is off-putting to Black people because they know what he did in terms of the race struggle), but this is a frustrating pattern for Peter that gets on my nerves.
Thus King’s more disturbing (to white people) criticism of racism is avoided, and his clichéd prescriptions for feel-good, nonviolent activism are repeated ad nauseum, allowing white pacifists to cash in on an authoritative cultural resource to confirm their nonviolent activism and prevent the acknowledgement of the racism inherent in their position by associating themselves with a noncontroversial black figurehead.
One more time, this is not purely a problem of pacifists. Please, align your criticism correctly. Do pacifists use it? Yes. But who else benefits from it, Peter? Who else is more likely to have engaged in this manufactured narrative and it perpetuating across the country? Do you think pacifists are responsible for that, or do you think it's white supremacist leadership in a liberal democracy? Because I'm pretty sure it's the latter, with the pacifists imbibing the same lessons we all got. (Let's also go back to Peter's footnote about his school days. Was the history curriculum he received the fault of pacifists or was it the fault of the VIOLENT state who benefits from that narrative? Which is the chicken, and which is the egg?)
The pacifists aren't guiltless, but we can at least be honest about how the world works.
However, there is a Eurocentric universalism in the idea that we are all part of the same homogeneous struggle and white people at the heart of the Empire can tell people of color and people in the (neo)colonies the best way to resist.
Oh, so we can do it, but we can't figure out how pacifists (who are not a dominant majority, btw) aren't at the helm for the development of such absurd and racist propaganda.
The people most affected by a system of oppression should be at the forefront of the struggle against that particular oppression, yet pacifism again and again produces organizations and movements of white people illuminating the path and leading the way to save brown people, because the imperative of nonviolence overrides the basic respect of trusting people to liberate themselves.
Peter, the fucking anarchist movement has a lot of white men trying to lead the way forward in places like the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe (and even Latin America, despite their desire to pretend they're not Euro-descended when it benefits them). You want to sit and think about how this is part and parcel of white supremacist patriarchy or nah? Hell, when I did work with small anarchist groups in Taiwan, white men kept trying to override people instead of sitting the fuck down and listening. White cis men love the status that comes with being white cis men; white people love the status that comes with being white people. (Also, Peter, you're a white man trying to be at the forefront of anarchist movements... Hmmm...)
Whenever white pacifists concern themselves with a cause that affects people of color, and resisters among the affected people of color do not conform to the particular definition of nonviolence in use, the white activists place themselves as the teachers and guides, creating a dynamic that is remarkably colonial.
Broken record time but: THIS ISN'T JUST LIMITED TO WHITE PACIFISTS. PLEASE LOOK AROUND YOU.
Of course, this is largely a function of whiteness (a socially constructed worldview taught diffusively to all people identified by society as “white”). Militant white activists can and do incur similar problems when they disrespect allies of color by dictating the appropriate, orthodox method of struggle.
THIS IS ALL YOU NEEDED TO SAY. Everything said about pacifists is moot because literally? This right here? Is what you should've been focusing on. This is not a problem limited to pacifists, and it is an egregious error in thought and presentation to waste so much time and space acting as if it is to then rug-pull your idea. Just say what you mean, put it front and center, and stop waffling like you've got a bigger point to make when your point is literally that WHITE PEOPLE CARE MORE ABOUT WHITENESS THAN LIBERATION OF ALL. What an absolute limp pool noodle of a thought leader, goddamn.
Today, their veterans are not dead or imprisoned (excepting three victims of an early explosives making accident and those who left Weather to fight alongside members of the Black Liberation Army); they are living comfortably as academics and professionals.
Wonder if Peter realized he'd also be living in the academic circuit, propped up by the academics and professionals he snidely remarks upon here. (How else do you get a fellowship at an Austrian university without having any credentials to your name, which is usually a requirement for such a position? While I think that is an absurd requirement and one that helps no one, I find it interesting that Peter managed to do it just fine.) The irony drips like honey.
Many of the most vocal disdain ongoing liberation struggles, denouncing them as “not anarchist,” rather than supporting their most anti-authoritarian elements. The result is that these hard-core (and, at the same time, armchair) anarchists can find no real (and dangerous) resistance worthy of their support, so they stick to militant postures and the violence of ideological hairsplitting.
So says a man who loves doing ideological hairsplitting, especially when he's wrong. Particularly about matters he has little or no knowledge of at all. Hmm. Sounds like something that's part and parcel of white cisheteropatriarchy.
Also, most anarchists work in not-anarchist projects... Either because the anarchist projects around us are actively harmful in some way (anti-queer, anti-immigrant, anti-sex worker... ergo, not anarchist) or because we exist in such limited numbers that we have no other options if we want to do work that we consider important.
And not all resistance has to be dangerous. What is this macho posturing? Can nonviolent work become dangerous? Yes. But why should we seek out dangerous things just to support them? (Also weird to see this shit from a man who gets cranky if you bring up how therapy doesn't change abusers but helps them to abuse better or try discussing anything related to KYLR. Violence is only good when macho-posturing is done, I guess.)
Beneath their frequent and manipulative usage of people of color as figureheads and tame spokespersons, pacifists follow a tactical and ideological framework formulated almost exclusively by white theorists.
Irony of seeing this author routinely engage in doing this precise thing any time an anarcha-feminist challenges him. He can't walk the walk, can he?
Pacifists would also do well to examine the color of violence. When we mention riots, whom do we envision? White activists committing property destruction as a form of civil disobedience may stretch, but do not usually lose, the protective covering of “nonviolence.” People of color engaged in politically motivated property destruction, unless strictly within the rubric of a white activist-organized protest, are banished to the realm of violence, denied consideration as activists, not portrayed as conscientious.
This isn't wrong, but this is an example of the rhetoric that Peter should've been using throughout this whole fucking book to make his case. He desperately needed an editor, if I'm honest. If he had one, they did him a grave disservice with his milquetoast book that points fingers in the wrong directions for how the world operates. (e.g., Yes, pacifism can and often does support the state... but also, your problems are less with pacifism when you start talking about dynamics of oppression and being very general about them... and also ignoring the development of certain beliefs and how those beliefs permeate other spaces. When he does this at all, it feels like an after-thought.)
Violence and criminality are nearly interchangeable concepts (consider how comfortable pacifists are in using the terminology of statist morality — for example, “justice” — as their own), and a chief purpose of both concepts is to establish blame.
Have... you considered that being a pacifist doesn't necessitate that you're anti-state? And that propaganda that supports states has been wildly successful in many movements? There are even anarchists, people who should be ostensibly anti-state, who keep using rhetoric and terminology of the state and its morality. There are anarchists who see state institutions as unequivocal good, even when we can show they're not. So yeah, again. Not a problem of pacifism (but it is weird to think pacifists are inherently anti-state when most aren't).
Victim-blaming was a key part of pacifist discourse, strategy even, in the 1960s and 70s, when many white activists helped justify state actions and neutralize what could have become anti-government outrage at violent state repression of black and other liberation movements, such as the police assassinations of Panther organizers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Rather than supporting and aiding the Panthers, white pacifists found it more fashionable to state that they had “provoked violence” and “brought this on themselves.”
Yep. And again, this chapter would do more if you had specific examples of that rather than just stating a thing happened amongst pacifists that happened among a lot of white (and also non-white) people in the US and abroad. I've seen examples of white Marxists who also didn't want to support them... Victim-blaming is part and parcel of the white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy. That doesn't justify it, but that highlights the argument you have. It's not just pacifism, so it's on you to outline the precise ways this is happening within pacifiist movements. So far, all I'm getting is “pacifists mirror non-pacifist liberal democrats and are nothing better than pawns that do the work of those above them.”
One gets the impression that if more Gypsies, Jews, gays, and others had violently resisted the Holocaust, pacifists would find it convenient to blame that little phenomenon on the absence of an exclusively pacifist opposition as well.
Or one understands that most people try to erase the queers (not just gays), the Romani, and the disabled from the Holocaust all the fucking time, which does better for the state than to acknowledge the existence of these demographics.
Also, cute presumption that all Romani, queers, and disabled people went willingly with little to no resistance whatsoever. This is also a form of erasure, especially since he doesn't even address these demographics in his copy-paste of both Ward Churchill and Yehuda Bauer's discussion of the Holocaust... Well, it's weird to just drop them in here, y'know. Like they're props.
... Just mentioning the Kristian Williams citation. Ugh.
Hip-hop artists bonded to the major record labels largely abandon the glorification of anti-state violence and replace it with an increase in the more fashionable violence against women.
While there's a grain of truth here, can we also look at how other male artists (especially white ones) got away with it? Or do you want to sit down and consider who was willing to replace it with the “fashionable” violence against women? Idk, the inclusion of this hip-hop paragraph feels so out of left field. What's the point when you're talking about pacifists? Yeah, black resistance gave birth to music like hip-hop, but uh... It doesn't make sense to talk about here? And if there are connections, you're not making them. (Capitalism is a connection to everything. This is a paragraph about how white supremacist capitalism ruins shit and glorifies violence against demographics of people, like women. There probably is an explicit link to pacifism somehow, but Peter's not making it.)
It is exactly these stories of empowerment that white pacifists ignore or blot out.
Remind me again which white pacifist wrote the “state-sanctioned school textbooks,” Peter. I'll wait. This framing is actually harmful to the argument being made (which can be made), and it's so consistent that it makes me wonder how people read this and thought he was a stellar philosopher. It's confusing.
On April 20, 2006, a co-founder of Food Not Bombs (FNB), the majority-white anti-authoritarian group which serves free food in public places through one hundred chapters (mostly in North America, Australia, and Europe), sent out a call for support for the new FNB chapter in Nigeria.
I mean, you could have a whole chapter dedicated to the issues of FNB and nonviolence on its own. They have a statement; we know they are, and we also know they're state supporters (not entirely anarchists, regardless of how many exist within varying FNB branches). Honestly, I would've found it more compelling if Peter focused on their adherence to nonviolence and how it, specifically, supports the state. At least it would've been good for pulling FNB chapters up for promoting nonsense, especially as they are targets for state repression (because feeding people is bad, y'know).
Though, it does have to be said that feeding people vegan meals is going to largely be a nonviolent strategy. It is a nonviolent strategy that is met with further repression and does need a response (not just... letting it happen over and over, as the statement seems to imply). But that's not the direction Peter understands it from.
The contradiction in ostensibly revolutionary pacifism is that revolution is never safe, but to the vast majority of its practitioners and advocates, pacifism is about staying safe, not getting hurt, not alienating anyone, not giving anyone a bitter pill to swallow.
Not inherently wrong, but we'r'e shifiting goal posts again. “Revolutionary pacifism?” Weird inclusion to just toss in when he really hasn't prior.
Rather than “putting themselves in harm’s way” to protect members of the black, brown, and red liberation movements (a protection their privilege might have adequately conferred because of how costly it would have been for the government to murder affluent white people in the midst of all the dissension spurred by heavy losses in Vietnam), conscientious pacifists ignored the brutalization, imprisonment, and assassination of Black Panthers, American Indian Movement activists, and others.
Idk, if we listen to people like Joy James, I have a feeling we'd be told that a lot of people did this and that it was not just a white pacifist attitude. Leonard Peltier didn't spend decades in prison only to be givenn house arrest (not even a pardon, thanks Biden) because of a dedicated group of white supremacist pacifists, and I think he'd even say the same. Would he have critiques on hyper-fixation for nonviolent strategies? Would he have critiques about pacifism? Probably, yeah. And they'd probably be pretty damn good ones. And specific.
Unlike this, which is just arguing against generic white supremacist society (which we should do) and doing very little work to actually talk about pacifism in particular.
Worse still, they encouraged the state repression and claimed that the revolutionaries deserved it by engaging in militant resistance. (Nowadays, they are claiming that the liberationists’ ultimate defeat, which pacifists facilitated, is proof of the ineffectiveness of liberationists’ tactics.)
THIS IS NOT ONLY A PROBLEM OF PACIFISTS. Good grief, this should just be “LibDem Bullshit Protects the State” at this rate.
Revered pacifist David Dellinger admits that “one of the factors that induces serious revolutionaries and discouraged ghetto-dwellers to conclude that nonviolence is incapable of being developed into a method adequate to their needs is this very tendency of pacifists to line up, in moments of conflict, with the status quo.” David Gilbert concludes that “failure to develop solidarity with the Black and other liberation struggles within the US (Native American, Chicano/Mexican, Puerto Rican) is one of the several factors that caused our movement to fall apart in the mid-70s.” Mumia Abu-Jamal questions, were white radicals “really ready to embark on a revolution, one that did not prize whiteness?”
I feel like I need to play a Sesame Street game of “one of these things isn't like the others, one of these things isn't the same.” Mumia's literally talking about all white radicals, while Gilbert and Dellinger are engaging in self-critique on pacifism and nonviolent resistance. Though interconnnected, Peter isn't making that point clear or at all relevant.
Like I said, LibDem Bullshit Protects the State but make it edgy.
And even then, the practice of nonviolence is often subsidized by whites in power, used by white dissidents or government officials to manipulate the movement for their comfort, and usually abandoned by large portions of the grassroots in favor of more militant tactics.
The government, famous pacifists. How many times do I need to say that this is less about pacifism and the hyper-fixation on nonviolence as a strategy than it is about typical liberal democracy and white supremacist rubbish. I would've preferred the discussion about pacifism being racist, but it keeps getting sidelined for generic things that don't talk about pacifism in the first place and also Peter's inability to understand that “nonviolent strategy” or what constitutes “nonviolence” doesn't map neatly onto everything he fucking cites.
At least Ward Churchill knew the assignment, but I have to deduct points because he liked this book (enough to cite it in footnotes). Probably because it was an ego boost to see a Baby Anarchist (at the time) rip off his Marxist diatribe point for point, if I'm honest.
White radicals must educate other white people about why people of color are justified in rebelling violently and why we too should use a diversity of tactics to free ourselves, struggle in solidarity with all who have rejected their place as the lackeys or slaves of the elite, and end these global systems of oppression and exploitation.
Not wrong again, but why did we shift the goal posts from “white pacifists” to “white radicals?” The two aren't the same, even if there may be overlaps.
Overwhelmingly, this chapter is meandering and doesn't do the job it sets out to do. It fails to engage with a whole history of possible nonviolence, it keeps referencing how the world is that influences white pacifists but swapping the position of where much of that propaganda comes from (because while they're not guiltless, they're not the ones in charge of the media, schools, and any other government institutions), and it shifts goal posts because it can't actually do any work.
The footnotes are largely from emails and listserv, and I find that frustating because we can't even backtrack any of it. I can do some research to gleen some information, but it's all lost and Peter doesn't recreate shit. He just writes like he's picking a forum fight, refusing to even provide any amount of details that clarify anything for the reader. This chapter feels superfluous, if I'm honest.