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.