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.