related tags: #ShortReading

• Odysseus at the End of Civilization by Bret Devereaux (23 July 2026)

The result is a fundamentally conservative, almost Burkean critique: Whatever structural problems society has, its catastrophic collapse comes not from those structural issues but from the violation of long-standing norms of behavior.

This is... very true. It's also a very common theme in Nolan's work, as he always finds ways to have conservative critiques that wrap back around to “the structure is fine, but it is us who have failed.” He never wants to think about how “we” (for it is always “we” and never the people responsible) can so consistently fail as a result of the structure. I wish Devereaux would point this out. Many people have, but it bears repeating.

Anyway, lots of interesting conversation due to the inclusion of history... as expected of Devereaux's writing. His blog posts are far more interesting, though.

• LifeLog was real.

An interesting audio setup discussing LifeLog, which was a system that had been built by the Pentagon to effectively collect evidence about and index everyone's lives. It also connects a lot of what has happened with modern “social” media (e.g., Facebook) and other services (e.g., Google Pay) and how they have operated as surveillance for our whole lives. We've been indexing everything just as the Pentagon wanted.

LifeLog is not a story about a program that died. It's a story about who is allowed to build it.

• [B-Sides: Gloria Steinem’s “The Beach Book”] by Sari Edelstein (29 January 2025)

Found in another post, this was a review of Gloria Steinem's much less known The Beach Book. Despite my many frustrations with her, this is at least in some part adorable. It was found in the next short read:

• Eight theses on Gloria Steinem, because goddamn by Sophie Lewis (7 September 2026)

With Gloria Steinem's death, it's important to hold an actual picture of who she was and what she did in our minds. Sophie Lewis does just that with her theses about Steinem. I do think it is occasionally more polite than I'd justify, but it is among the best pieces to hold a lot of these thoughts in one place.

• Some Like It Hot: Notes from the Marilyn Appreciation Society by Sophie Lewis (2022)

It's an interesting read that holds a lot more space for the complexities of Norma Jean/Marilyn Monroe than are ever really present in most places.

• Weird Little Guys (List)

While I think that calling fash and fash-adjacent people “weird” undermines the seriousness of what they do and how they impact communities, it's a decent list of blokes who hold harmful politics and fund others who do (and have power over us).

Chapter: Comments on How Nonviolence Protects the State By: Peter Gelderloos (2016) related tags: #tFoN

How Nonviolence Protects the State is fairly straightforward. It begins by disputing nonviolent histories and claims of victory in the Civil Rights movement, the independence movement in India, the anti-war movement during the US occupation of Vietnam, and the anti-nuclear movement. In all these cases, the pattern is clear: proponents of nonviolence whitewash a heterogeneous, often combative movement to portray it as nonviolent; and they portray a partial victory or an important but limited accomplishment as an ultimate victory, speaking in unison with the State to declare a happy ending to a movement that was in fact still in struggle (and of course hiding the important role of the non-pacifist elements in achieving whatever gains were won).

Even as someone who should ostensibly agree, that whole book (and those sections in particular) are some of the worst analysis I've ever seen that neglect so many social structures.

One reviewer claimed the book advocates terrorism, citing a passage where I argue that an al-Qaida bombing in Madrid did more to end Spain’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq than a million people peacefully protesting, and leaving out the part where I explicitly state that such bombings do not constitute a model for revolutionary action because the calloused condemnation of innocent people is fundamentally authoritarian.

Does anyone want to correct the fact that it wasn't a fucking al-Qaeda bombing and that there was no evidence of it being one? Which I pointed out when I read that fucking book? Which Peter could've corrected here?

For fuck's sake.

One reviewer, writing in Left Turn, objected that I did not define “revolution” the way Che would have, and then went on to make a number of false claims about what I said in the book.

This bit is important for the context of the review.

The reviewer, Dan Horowitz de Garcia, a member of the “cadre organization” Bring the Ruckus, falsely claims that I do not explain why I lump together pacifism and nonviolence, that I do not distinguish between a way of life and a method...

Footnote 117. Garcia's critique isn't something I'm interested in, but he's not wrong here. Peter did not explain why he lumps together pacificism and nonviolence; he just does it, and he does it without regarding anything about anything. Again, he could've taken a little more inspiration from Churchill and just stuck with one. He didn't.

!! INTERLUDE STARTS !!

In fact, Garcia largely spoke positively of Peter's book in concept (because it tries to engage a conversation that is sorely necessary). However, what he did say is: “Gelderloos’s anger is clear, however his analysis isn’t.”

This is true. Peter's analysis is all over the place, both in How Nonviolence Protects the State and here in The Failure of Nonviolence.

Garcia continues:

The problems start in the introduction with his definitions. He defines revolution as “a social upheaval with widespread transformative effects.” World War II was a social upheaval, but I’m thinking Che talked about something different. He makes nonviolence a synonym for pacifism by defining both as, “a way of life or a method of social activism that avoids, transforms, or excludes violence….” There is a difference between a method and a way of life, but Gelderloos ignores this and therefore hamstrings his historical analysis.

This is also largely true. While I don't care what Che would've thought about how to define a revolution, neither of these points are wrong and are things that genuinely cause frustrations while reading the text. (Also, the bit about Che feels like a joke? Rather than him genuinely thinking Peter should've defined it as Che did.)

Footnote 117 continues with:

... that I wrote that the Civil Rights movement did not win anything, that I portrayed that movement as homogeneous, that I only made one reference to the Black Panther Party, in addition to other choice bits of misinformation. He completely skews the entire chapter on patriarchy on the basis of a single willfully misinterpreted sentence while failing to mention the contents of the rest of the chapter, makes the curious distinction that a social phenomenon should not be called a movement if it does not win, and twists other arguments I make.

That's how Peter portrays this part of the review:

Unable to critically examine the history, Gelderloos opts for the paternalistic argument that the civil rights movement didn’t win anything. He doesn’t differentiate between the modern civil rights movement, which demanded equality, and the Black power movement, which demanded liberation. He simply says there was one civil rights movement that demanded equality and liberation, but didn’t win it. He acknowledges the ending of legal segregation (Jim Crow), but de facto segregation exists so that’s a wash.

And honestly, that is the argument that Peter ends up making. Maybe he should've gotten an editor (or a good friend) to read the book or something, but that's the conclusion of his argument in that text. And those are the things that he ignored.

Garcia continues by saying:

He places the blame on the reliance on nonviolence. He doesn’t ask an obvious question, at least obvious to me: If a movement isn’t able to affect any kind of change, let alone reach its goal, should it be called a movement? He doesn’t define movement in the book, so I assume he uses the word not to describe a societal phenomenon, but to lend importance to activity.

And... that's also true. This is a question that Peter should've asked.

Oh, and lastly, this bit of Garcia's review:

The most disappointing, even maddening, section of the book was devoted to patriarchy. I hoped for some interesting observations and questions. Instead, it led to something stupid. Gelderloos actually states that patriarchy can be “gradually overcome by groups that work to destroy it.” A page later, he unintentionally explains that nearly every tactical or strategic discussion he’s participated in was dominated by men. Now it makes sense. He’s surrounded by men who (surprise!) are taking a “gradual” approach to gender liberation.

STRANGELY, THIS IS A THING THAT I KEPT SAYING AS I READ IT, TOO. It's truly bizarre that Peter didn't recognise how obtuse it was.

Peter just doesn't like people being critical of him, claiming the review was a personal attack. Thin skin is so cute!

Back to this fucking book...

!! INTERLUDE CONCLUDES !!

A review on The New Compass faults my book for an “anarchist bias [that] is so overwhelming throughout the entire work that the critique becomes limited in its ability to restart an important debate by seeming to be at times little more than an anarchist intercommunal polemic”. This is another flaw I have tried to improve in the current book.

... An anarchist bias is fine, but I don't think Speitel and I share the same understanding of what an anarchist is. However, if Peter thinks he fixed any of these things, he hasn't. This book is an even worse polemic than the other one, and it includes very little evidence of topics he discusses.

I'm skipping a chunk of this. It's either him picking fights with people who aren't wrong or him fighting people who he presents as obnoxious (Milan Rai). And because I don't know them and don't care, this whole thing is so fucking pointless. It should've been a goddamned blog post or something. He could've been a drama YouTuber.

I think many proponents of nonviolence have a serious problem with colonial, paternalistic attitudes or the victimization of historically oppressed groups, and most of the specific criticisms I was relaying originated with comrades from those groups; however I think it is a long-term problem that needs to be approached with patience, and by applying labels like “racist”, to white people who sincerely, however ineffectively, want to do away with racism, I may have added to a dynamic that discourages critical thinking and encourages one’s own side to ostracize or disqualify and the other side to look for their own insults and disqualifiers to throw back.

If people are being racist, they should know. If they are hurt for being told they're being racist, uh... Guess what.

But that's also not quite what Peter was doing. He was throwing insults, but they were largely unnecessary ones. And telling someone they're being racist isn't an insult.

... And with that, this book is done.

Chapter: A Diversity of Methods By: Peter Gelderloos (2016) related tags: #tFoN

Rejecting nonviolence does not mean running to the opposite extreme of building a revolutionary practice around the concept of violence.

Literally, this is where the book could've started. And it could've been a fucking essay.

Such a practice could prove to be interesting and valuable, especially if violence were understood as transgression, that which shocks and disturbs by breaking society’s norms at a symbolic and material level.

Sounds almost like the title to César Cruz's poem: To Comfort the Disturbed, and to Disturb the Comfortable. (Also, he was credited with “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”)

But opposites tend to reproduce the same logic; in order to function as opposites they must exist within the same paradigm.

Hey, this is the argument you should've been making from PAGE ONE. Instead, you've spent 70% of this book arguing on their terms rather than setting the ones you claimed to want.

Authoritarian thinking, which is the most immature, both ethically and conceptually, requires the simplification of a complex reality.

Why do we even need a concept of maturity here? What does it mean to be “ethically immature?” There's no reason for this. Just say what you want: Authoritarian thinking requires the oversimplification of a complex reality.

I suspect that this is why proponents of nonviolence like Rebecca Solnit have denounced it as a tool for irresponsible, violent rioters without making any reference to the historical record (Gleneagles, Heiligendamm, St. Paul, Vancouver, Toronto, and so on...): because a functioning diversity of tactics framework undermines nonviolence by disproving its claims to supremacy and allowing peaceful activists to act peacefully in harmony with other very different forms of protest.

Here's a problem: Your arguments with Rebecca Solnit could've functioned as footnotes, and it would've been helpful here. I don't remember anything from that list of people because it was so tedious to get through. Now I'm trying to remember even a glimmer of what he'd said about her, and I'm recalling nothing.

This is a problem of Peter's writing and structure. It assumes you know or remember way more than you otherwise might.

Ridiculous as they may be, these pacifist responses demonstrate the limitations of a diversity of tactics.

WHAT RESPONSES. Also, why can't we pick a term and stick with it? Peter loves Ward Churchill so much, he may as well just copy him directly and stick primarily with pacificists and utilise 'nonviolent' or 'nonviolence' in specific moments (rather than using them for people).

I also don't know what the point of this chapter is because he's just giving subheadings, some blathering, and then moving on. It's analytically lacking and an inept way of writing.

The NAACP presents itself as the organization that represents all black people in the US. Are white people allowed to disagree with its politics without being racist?

While I think there is a necessary conversation to have regarding the weaponisation of race and racism (usually utilised as a silencing tactic to prevent other criticisms—such as Patrice Onwuka's nonsensical op-ed in WaPo about how socialism targets her Black immigrant family and doesn't allow them to participate in the (colonialist) American Dream)... I don't think that Peter's doing a good job here in framing it? Because it comes off sounding like an aggrieved white person who just learned what racism is, and that's not helpful.

That's even with it being followed by:

Where our actions intersect with dynamics of race and the differences between those most affected and those less affected, we have to be sensitive, humble, and open to criticism. But if our framework encourages us to play it safe, and makes it safer to avoid being called racist by doing nothing than by taking action, then we have a serious problem.

Like, yeah. We do need to be sensitive and open to criticism, so I don't inherently disagree... but he needs to find ways to not come off like he's more worried someone'll call him racist.

A related problem is when an issue is closer to some people than to others. At a protest against austerity measures, everyone affected by austerity (which is practically the entire society) can be a protagonist. Because austerity does not affect everyone in the same way, no one should decide how others can participate. At a student protest, students as well as those who are excluded from being students by economic or other factors should be able to take the lead. But, for example, at an indigenous solidarity protest, people who are not indigenous should probably take their cues from those who are rather than imposing their own rhythm or methods.

Again, yeah... But also, consider who is around you when you choose to do what you're doing and whether they're okay with it. Some people affected my austerity are more impacted than others; some students are more impacted than others. It's not an oppression hierarchy, but it is ensuring the safety of those who are more vulnerable than yourself. This doesn't mean don't act but that you act responsibly.

This is something he rarely engages with at all. He can only see it in the above example.

The other aspect to making sure people are okay with what you're doing is your own safety. Narcs will cause problems, so you better have a crowd big enough or security good enough to counteract that.

During the uprising in Turkey in the spring of 2013, I participated in a solidarity demo that had been called for in a small town in the US. A number of Turkish immigrants were among those who convened the protest. A couple of them tried to enforce a unifying discourse, saying that the uprising in Turkey was about democracy and human rights. They also used the Turkish national flag as a symbol for that struggle. They attempted to guide the protest along a much more peaceful path than is the norm in that town, walking on the sidewalk rather than taking the street, for example. A number of anarchists participated. Some of them had friends and comrades from Istanbul who were involved in the Taksim Square occupation from early on. These anarchists gently criticized the use of the Turkish flag as a symbol for the struggle, and chanted slogans critical of capitalism, the police, and all forms of government. It was shocking, though sadly unsurprising, how easily national identity was used to create insiders and outsiders with essentially legitimate or illegitimate ideas. Simply by being born Turkish, one protester could claim to represent a movement he had never participated in, whereas a person of another ethnic identity who has friends who helped make the occupation and resulting struggle a reality can be branded an illegitimate outsider when they are trying to promote the same discourse as their comrades in Istanbul.

This... is frustrating. I get where he's coming from. I participated in a BLM solidarity march where I live now, which is across the Atlantic Ocean. Black people were leading it (which makes sense), but they routinely ignored the most policed demographic if the country in which we live: the Romani. There were zero Romani people participating, there was zero care to include them, and the organisers adamantly refused that we should include Romani people because it was “a solidarity march for Black people.” They also ignored the whole anti-cop aspect of it, and they very much didn't like it when people called them out for their pro-cop stances (e.g., “If you have problems, go talk to the officers behind you”). They also weren't fond of being called out for using it as a way to platform their bands and do nothing politically relevant at all; it was nothing more than a tedious marketing gimmick pretending to be a solidarity march/demonstration.

But it's also a failure in understanding who is the “typical” immigrant in a space and that they will assimilate and also support multiple states.

For example, it would be a little bit odd, disrespectful even, to set a bank on fire in solidarity with the movement for a free Tibet, since that movement has been overwhelmingly pacifist.

... Elaborate? Like, this doesn't make any sense without explanation.

Other complaints arise when combative protesters use a crowd as a form of shelter for starting a riot, or create a conflictive situation in a place where people cannot easily get away, or around small children and others who are more vulnerable to police brutality. However, this concern is a complicated one. There have been occasions where confrontational protesters have opportunistically utilized others with no concern for their wants or well-being, simply because they needed a passive crowd for the realization of their tactic, and this is a breach of solidarity. But just as often, if not more so, there have been cases where protesters have stuck around when rioting started, delighted by the sound of smashing glass and basking in the glow of the fires, but later, after they were arrested, blamed the rioters for endangering them. Although it does happen, it is relatively rare that a riot comes out of nowhere, with no indication that it is about to start and no gradual build-up (especially when so many who riot come prepared, masked up and chanting angrily).

Rolling my eyes. Sorry, but I find part of this to be disingenuous because it all sounds like the biggest strawman. Are we celebrating Guy Faukes night?

Many people believe that there is a need to use cameras as a tool against police brutality or for counterinformation and alternative media. But a camera is far more dangerous to protesters than a molotov cocktail. No one should be using one at a protest without knowing what they are doing. Until Cop Watch collectives, legal aid groups, and Indymedia or other counterinformation activists start organizing workshops on how to film without enabling police surveillance, how to edit images to erase people’s identifying features, when it’s okay to put protesters’ faces on the internet, how to safely store, upload, and delete images, they should not take cameras to a protest. At a protest, they should identify themselves so others know they are not cops or corporate journalists. And everyone else with a camera should be asked to put it away or leave.

... So... we give certain groups power and then we let people do the harass until... Honestly, it's amusing how often he defaults to authoritarian thinking without realising it.

These are all social guidelines that he's now handing over to certain groups of people, without even considering the implications.

... This entire chapter was making my eyes glaze over. He's so repetitive, and it's to the point where it's actively disruptive to reading.

Chapter: Who Are the Pacifists? By: Peter Gelderloos (2016) related tags: #tFoN

And here we go with a chapter that is going to be nothing but a list of grievances against varying groups and people.

Another common trait is that many of those listed pass themselves off as experts and attempt to exercise authority over social movements on the basis of that expertise.

He's more than likely not wrong, but I struggle with this critique because he routinely does this in things that he has not spent much time engaging with (or has engaged with passively) when he fights with people who've spent a lot of time researching them. One such instance is when he went after anti-abuse activists (who were also anarchists) who had elaborated why it was that therapy, as it currently stands, is a tool that more often supports abusers... and he sent dogpiles after them.

So he also does this on the regular, but it seems to be okay that he does.

They are professionals and careerists, and their flirtation with social movements is often a step on the road to personal advancement.

Something that he appears to have been doing in recent years through is academy-based connections.

In order, we get the following sections in this chapter: – Gene Sharp – US Military – Dalai Lama – George Soros – Bono and Bob Geldof – Chris Hedges – Rebecca Solnit – Movement musicians – Stratfor – Judge Ann Aiken – Mark Kurlansky – The Old School

Sharp is a member of the intellectual elite, and in 2012 he was even the favored nominee to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, an award he would have shared with mass murderers and war leaders like Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, and Menachem Begin.

Is this not more a critique of the Nobel Peace Prize than it is of Gene Sharp? While he may play into the system via it, he is not the one who developed the award and its nonsensical criteria. Why not criticise the role of the committee and how it promotes war criminals as peaceful and safe people?

In Sharp’s case, the prize would have been another element in the international operation to portray the Arab Spring as a series of nonviolent movements obediently following the tutelage of Western experts on democratic social change.

This is more applicable and a far more interesting conversation to have, especially if we could focus on commonalities like the colonialism/imperialism of these people and institutions.

In 2005, during the height of armed resistance to the US occupation of Iraq, the Pentagon got caught running a multimillion dollar covert propaganda campaign, paying to plant articles in Iraqi media made to appear as though they were written by locals, urging Iraqis to use nonviolent tactics to resist the Americans.

About the US military. This doesn't seem so much a critique of nonviolence but a critique of the weaponization of it (along with the logical conclusion of a coercive nonviolence).

In 1989 the Dalai Lama was given the Nobel Peace Prize.

Again, this sounds like it'd be better placed as a critique of the committee granting it, the process, and the propaganda around it. It'd be another thing if they were directly giving themselves the awards.

Soros is largely credited with aiding the transition to neoliberal capitalism in Hungary. It is clear what this billionaire’s vision of an ideal world consists of.

I'm not supporting Soros in any capacity, but it is amusing because he can basically be blamed in all directions. His funding of education in Hungary supported Viktor Orbán, so that is also his ideal world...?

George Soros has a lot of things to critique, but this is a superficial examination at best, along with things that certainly need citations (e.g., “Gene Sharp's AEI also received funding from Soros”—okay, that's more than likely, but at least cite SourceWatch or something? citations are definitely needed in so much of this book).

His article was a virulent attack on the anarchist Black Bloc within the then-ongoing Occupy movement. Hedges, writing as though he were a movement participant and someone with the movement’s best interests in mind, makes a number of claims: that the Black Bloc is a group or movement inspired by John Zerzan, who wrote for the magazine Green Anarchy which was so dastardly that it even criticized the Zapatistas; that the Black Bloc members hate the Left more than they hate the 1%; that the Black Bloc is a sexist group based on “hypermasculinity”; that the violence of the Black Bloc is a perfect excuse for police repression; and that people should take action to purge their movement of this cancer. He extensively interviews author Derrick Jensen, who had previously supported violent tactics but subsequently denounced so-called Black Bloc anarchists because they had the gall to criticize him (for acting like a celebrity, for saying that some people should write books in favor of dangerous tactics and other people should carry out those tactics, for supporting authoritarian methods in the environmental movement, and so on).

Sounds like the hypermasculinity argument keeps coming, not from the people mocking manarchists for their continued misogyny... But from men like Chris Hedges.

And yet, Peter writes about it in an anti-feminist tone when he could actually point to the proper example of what he's talking about. Weird.

Rebecca Solnit IS ONE of the few influential proponents of nonviolence who actually participate in social movements on the ground, rather than as an elite journalist, academic, or celebrity. To her credit, she actually puts her money where her mouth is. It is worth noting that her influence is probably due to her being an accomplished writer, rather than (as far as I can tell, having overlapped with her to a certain extent) an inspiring example of the development of an effective practice in actual nonviolent movements. I point this out only to clarify her role, and to underline my earlier argument that Gene Sharp’s is perhaps the only nonviolent method that has effectively been put into practice, though with horrible results as we have seen. Rebecca Solnit advocates a more radical, involved, and committed form of nonviolent action, though I get the feeling that, given the stagnation of such action in practice, she has turned largely to slinging mud at ideological opponents.

... There's a lot of irony here, mixed with some interesting “I get the feeling that” (which isn't evidence that she has been doing what she says she has). Regardless of opinion on Rebecca Solnit, this is a perfect encapsulation of him writing in an antifeminist way (while portending otherwise). He doesn't bother to actually verify or even provide evidence of what he means when he says that he “gets the feeling” that she has turned to slinging mud. (Also, what does he count as “slinging mud”? And has he been doing it throughout his 'career'?)

And I doubt she could point to any source where proponents of nonviolence have been able to show that all violence is the same either historically, socially, or psychologically. I suspect that for many it is a religious conviction, but in any case the argument functions as a form of manipulation, the demagogic use of a category that cannot be defended.

... Sorry, he “doubts that she could point to any source?” I mean, he's not wrong about this, but these kinds of arguments are hard to take seriously when he's literally providing... well, in most cases? Nothing at all.

Instead of taking on the arguments of those she disagrees with, she tries to make them disappear.

And instead of pointing to specific arguments to be addressed in certain cases (see the section about manarchists), you also obfuscate and flatten critiques. Even when the critiques you discuss exist, you flatten others into them and then erase them because you don't like them. Literally, it's the same shit all over again.

That’s the whole point: unlike proponents of nonviolence, proponents of combative methods of revolutionary struggle cannot be high-profile. We cannot flirt with the movement and also become respected, professional writers like Solnit.

Actually sounds like a good critique to use elsewhere, though it's funny that “we” cannot be high-profile (but apparently some of “us” can use our names plainly and be so commonly referenced despite other issues while also accessing more elite spaces).

Even if she knew about Marius Mason, she would not have mentioned him, since part of her politics includes silencing any woman or trans person who contradicts her dogma that violence is a dude thing.

Does she? If yes, why not include a citation showing just that? (And I know a lot of feminists who do just that, but I think it's worth making very clear as an allegation. Dude can't handle the abuse allegations he gets because there's “no evidence,” but this level of systemic abuse gets no evidence either. It's weird.)

Unmasking every single false or misleading statement Solnit makes in this one article would take up more pages than I think she deserves, and the further I go in her article, the more I start to believe I am making a mistake in taking her seriously at all.

Was he sitting there reading her article as he was writing this? No wonder this whole section feels like him airing grievances.

Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor, is a key “global intelligence” company based in Austin, Texas. Its clients include numerous government agencies and Fortune 500 companies such as Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, and Northrop Grumman, and its activities include spying on activists and dissident movements. In 2001, Barron’s magazine referred to it as “the shadow CIA”. In 2011 it made the news for being the target of a major hacking campaign by the groups Anonymous and Lulzsec, a campaign for which anarchist hacker Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to ten years in prison after being set up by an FBI informant, the unscrupulous “Sabu”.

... This isn't even in the same category as individuals. Could he not have split this into multiple lines of critique with specific examples? This is so annoying and makes for a difficult read.

Also, will he have anything to say on Backtrace Security? Which is part of why Sabu was identified? They were former Anonymous hackers who became critical of vigilante hacktivism. Sabu does deserve some criticism for turning to an informant, but would he have had to make that choice if not for others who forced him to make it? Worth considering.

It's also worth wondering if he'd take to task a bunch of the white hats who all moved in to work on protecting exploitative technology under the guise of “justice” and “democracy.”

At the beginning of his tome, Kurlansky does not define “violence”, but he does claim that all of us are indoctrinated in its use, whatever it may be.

It's like Peter and Kurlansky share something in common with not defining things.

His only evidence for this is a spurious linguistic proof: the claim that there is no word for “nonviolence”; that in our culture we can only conceive of nonviolence as the negation of violence and not a constructive practice in its own right. This is completely false. The words “peace” and “peacefulness” represent positive states and behaviors, respectfully, and “peace” probably took on its current meaning long before “violence” did.

I wonder if there's a way to, like... check that without having to rely on a “probably” statement to do all your heavy-lifting. Like, c'mon. Etymology is a field of study. Look for it instead of making needless spurious claims.

Anyway, this is also tedious.

In fact, there are very different kinds of violence, and the violence of the powerful—the prisons, the police, wage labor, working conditions, pollution, deforestation, sex reassignment surgery on infants, structural adjustment programs, rising food costs, the forcible reeducation of queer youth at “ex-gay” boot camps, gentrification, and a long et cetera—is not legitimized as violence.

Peter, be more clear about “sex reassignment surgery on infants” instead of being a flippant piece of shit. This is an easily weaponisable piece of text by the wrong people, when you're likely talking about the coerced surgical imposition on intersex kids (because, while it's still worth pointing out as bad, circumcision is notably not sex reassignment).

Good grief. Consider your fucking words and who you're talking about a bit more.

Why were the Cherokee given this dubious courtesy? Because they were the “civilized Indians”, who gave up a large part of their culture to imitate European dress, economy, language, and social institutions.

Not to mention that they were also the people who most often had their culture stolen from them in the name of white folks claiming land “as Cherokees” (while they also refuse to engage with any Cherokee cultural practices) which is why you get a fuckton of white people who claim Cherokee heritage but neglect even participating. (Meanwhile, mixed Black-Cherokee people often struggle to be taken seriously by both sides. Worth considering.)

In Poland, one group of partisans sheltered over 1,000 Jewish refugees, keeping them safe while fighting back against German occupiers.

I'm not going to contradict this, but it is again another example of him NEEDING TO CITE HIS FUCKING SOURCES. Would he not want people to go and learn about this? Or does he only want people to learn from him what he deems appropriate?

Citations may sound like an academic requirement, but they are quite useful in more ways than just ensuring you're properly crediting people. If you're making an argument or stating a fact, I can go look it up for whatever reason. And that reason can also be simple curiosity.

I deal with this resistance more extensively in How Nonviolence Protects the State, and a much better book on the subject is Yehuda Bauer’s They Chose Life.

Oh, we get Yehuda Bauer. Who writes Zionist-revisionist history that also doesn't really handle Holocaust survivors well (and definitely writes out Palestinians). Intriguing.

But yet again, Peter references himself. Does he have nothing else?

He really has ire for Kurlansky, which... Idk, he could've just wrote that essay or book instead. It would've made more sense there, but the whole list of everything

... This chapter has specific examples (finally), but it reads like a list of grievances that makes it hard to get through. Even if he's right about some things, it's very exhausting to read the same rehashing over and over (because at the beginning, he says he made this list without looking at their commonalities—had he done that, the analysis would've been far more cohesive and less like being trapped listening to someone rant about different people... while also wanting references to go back to (which we mostly didn't get for anything at all, except the items of his specific grievances).

It's also frustrating because he's claiming to do this analysis from an anarchist perspective, and like... most of that is, again, superficial. “This guy doesn't even critique the state!” or whatever. No shit. If they're not anti-state in any capacity, they simply aren't going to. Maybe point at what is lost and what they gain from not critiquing the state instead of acting like it's a surprise.

And if you accuse someone of something, then at least do more than an “I feel” when you say they're engaging in certain behaviours in their writing and personal appearances. It's weird otherwise.

Chapter: Policing the Black Block, Disappearing the Ghetto By: Peter Gelderloos (2016) related tags: #tFoN

Some farmers destroyed construction equipment or shot at surveyors, while a number of sabotage actions were carried out by radical environmentalist and anarchist groups. As the resistance grew, it also became fashionable, and a large number of people from the folk-punk music scene who had been influenced by environmentalist and anarchist ideas flocked in and began to take part. However, these musicians and folk punks showed a strong adherence to nonviolence and shied away from any real social conflict. On a number of occasions, they spoke out against property damage, in favor of the right of bankers to be bankers, explaining that sabotage against banks was a violation of that right, and at one major protest they organized patrols to prevent vandalism against companies connected to the highway construction. This was especially hypocritical because many of them, aspiring to be professional musicians, sang about resistance, some would say exploiting histories of struggle where people had used the very tactics that they were trying to criminalize.

Specificity would work here. He loves calling out folks, so why not do it here? It's bizarre.

Also, white artists (like white academics) have a habit of extracting from communities they don't belong to without giving back. Perhaps that would also provide some interesting discussion here beyond how he's framing it and would actually put some blame in the corners that need it. (It's not just white artists and academics because the system itself incentivises all people to do just that, but they are largely more willingly to engage in it as a result of white supremacy.)

As with the previous chapter, there are no sources for anything. It's entirely polemic. Perhaps it's his own experience, I don't know. But it would've benefited him to provide even news articles or other pieces of information that would've supported his claims. Sometimes it'd be nice, especially when talking about somewhat niche events, for someone to actually drop even some news articles. As with everything, most footnotes (when they exist) have been more polemic (or self-promotional) and less resourceful.

... There's a whole section that fails to even delineate different anarchist demographics participating in varying events (other than one time, where he states 'white anarchists' and then points to them pushing nonviolence). Through most of this, he makes it unclear which anarchists he's even talking about because they simultaneously says that anarchists condemned action and then that anarchists supported the riots. It's confusing.

Like, yeah. Anarchists often end up having multiple perspectives (that's par for the course), but it'd be nice to at least have some kind of delineation between who was more likely to do what and maybe why. Again, no sourcing of any information (most of which should have some degree of sources, even if they're only news articles). He may be saying true things, but he's putting the entire onus on his reader to backtrack any information... which feels weird.

(After multiple complaints of lack of sourcing, he finally drops... three, but they're not for any specific event. They are largely for his point, which he's not doing a great job at making. I guess beggars can't be choosers.)

When indigenous people, anarchists, and immigrants fought with police or carried out property destruction in the protests against the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, protesting the capitalist spectacle, the gentrification that always accompanies such mega-events, or the fact that the Games were being held on stolen indigenous land, some nonviolent activists denounced the riots, portraying them as the work of privileged white male anarchists endangering more “vulnerable” people.

This kind of thing would've been good on a chapter of its own, especially the discussion of how a lot of marginalised anarchists get swept under the banner of the “privieleged white male anarchist.” Peter doesn't do this (and also contributes to it, even if accidentally, by not at least trying to generalise demographics).

The example of Darby may seem like a strawman to principled proponents of nonviolence, because Darby is not a pacifist. However, to those of us who have to share the streets with pacifists, the distinction is not always so clear.

This also would've been better as a chapter on infiltration and with examples of how people try to conduct entrapment within protest movements, but it doesn't necessarily work in this book (which he also kind of recognises). Just because Darby and pacificists “might look the same” in some capacity, it doesn't mean they are and doesn't mean Darby proves your point.

The fact of the matter is, violence is an ambiguous and moralistic category, so nonviolence inevitably becomes an exercise in hypocrisy. Even Gandhi organized a volunteer effort to support two British colonial wars in South Africa. The same criteria that can label Gandhi a supporter of nonviolence can also be applied to Brandon Darby. Darby might have been a fan of Che Guevara, but nowadays most people who side with nonviolence also fetishize Guevara or the Zapatistas or violent rebellions that happen far away.

As a result, this entire paragraph sounds nonsensical. Just delete it and write another chapter or a proper essay. Do you have editors? Friends who help you out as editors? Because if so, I'd find new ones.

Furthermore, a large part of Darby’s violent posturing was intended to entrap activists who might be inclined to use combative, illegal means.

Yes, but we also have bastards who will effectively entrap people into getting arrested even while engaging in nonviolent marches. It's called kettling. The purpose is similar, so it's not worth talking about in this way because there are better and more analytical ways to explore it.

The fact of the matter is, Darby was motivated by a political condemnation and a philosophical rejection of violence in social movements. In a December 29, 2008 open letter he published on Indymedia, Darby denounced those who take action motivated by “anger and hatred” and explained how “The majority of the activists who went to St. Paul did so with pure intentions and simply wanted to express their disagreements with the Republican Party”, making a distinction between good protesters who only want to voice their opinions, and bad protesters who wanted to take action and, in his mind, deserved to go to prison. In subsequent writings about the Occupy movement from his new column on the rightwing Breitbart.com, Darby’s rejection of the use of violence by political movements is crystal clear.

This still speaks of a better way to discuss people like Darby than uh... whatever he's been doing.

Also, this is a small-scale version of the same rhetorical flourish. He puts info toward the end that would've been better at the beginning. It feels like a gotcha moment that he's trying to create (if I'm charitable, to make a person thing one thing and then BAM another), and it really just makes me hate the way this is written because it's not really shifting my viewpoint but is making me wish I were reading a better analyst.

The FBI does not try to spread combative tactics within a social movement, they try to catch people red-handed and lock them up for life. One of their objectives is in fact to discourage people from using combative tactics by making people think that if they use illegal methods, they will be caught and severely punished. Because they aren’t the sharpest crayons in the box, nearly the only way they have been able to make cases is by threatening people until they agree to snitch, or by using psychologically manipulative informants to convince impressionable targets to take on an action they are not ready for. The FBI focus on those willing to go beyond peaceful protest clearly shows what kind of activities worry them more.

I hate to break it to you, Peter, but their goal is not just to discourage combative tactics. It's to discourage tactics they perceive as successful. The same is true of the CIA.

We also know this because “nonviolent activists” who they have believed to be successful and who they saw as undermining the current status quo (which they serve) have routinely been stalked, harassed, and investigated. Just because they take the easy way out with people who have a propensity to use combative methods doesn't suddenly erase their actual goals in favour of a more simplistic explanation.

They're there to disrupt movements and whatever solidarity arises from them.

Nonetheless, Darby’s action took advantage of a major weakness in one sector of the anarchist movement. By posing as a supporter of extreme tactics, he was able to get two people imprisoned because the broader scene left themselves vulnerable to someone who used intimidation, bullying, and macho posturing, someone they did not know well enough to trust in a situation of such great risk.

If Peter would actually, I don't know, provide resources on anything... a person could actually analyse Darby's actions. For instance, posted on the Houston Indymedia (06 Jan 2009):

The FBI documents make it clear that Darby did not restrict his informing to people he alleges were planning illegal activities. He also gathered information on numerous people who were engaged in lawful activism; including some who had no plans to attend the Republican Convention. “The wider net cast by Darby in his information gathering shows that he was part of an FBI campaign to suppress political dissent and activism,” said Will Potter, an award-winning independent journalist. “By gathering information on law abiding activists and then defending his actions as stopping violence, Darby contributes to the public perception that political dissent is criminal, which has a chilling effect on free speech.”

His behaviours were not limited to illegal activities. That is useful information and also highlights that these peopl are useful tools for the state in all organising. It also lets us explore their behaviours and what they report on most. Not to mention that the same article also points to how, as an older activist, he held sway over the two younger anarchists whose lives he ruined (but also that they disagreed with him and were kind of bullied into it).

Peter's writing in service of a specific narrative decreases our analytical ability on just this one moment and doesn't help us learn from it at all.

Others by unmasking or filming those who try to protect their identities, and making these videos available to police (whether by handing them over directly, or putting them on Facebook, which has become the primary investigative tool of police agencies across the planet).

A better conversation to start with, and then make this a part of, is why filming at protests isn't necessarily a good thing.

During the Oscar Grant riots, the media, the police, and proponents of nonviolence spoke with the same voice, claiming that the rioters were white anarchists from outside Oakland, come to take advantage of the situation and cause trouble. Delegitimizing rioters as outside agitators, and equating the categories of “anarchist” and “outside agitator” is nothing but the regurgitation of a longstanding government smear tactic. The US government used it when anticapitalist struggles heated up after World War I to justify the Palmer Raids and their deportation of thousands of immigrant anarchists.

Once again, he's already highlighting what the better and more engaging and useful conversation would be... which could house this frustration while also creating space for analysis.

The most upsetting part of this conspiracy theory [that black bloc is infiltrated by police provacateurs] is that it is clearly designed to sabotage debate. It becomes impossible to debate masking up or damaging property if such tactics are presented as police provocation strategies. And the mass media themselves help to spread the theory in a clear attempt to discredit enemies of the State.

THEN ADDRESS THIS MORE. Why is it such a short tangent to everything else?

Conspiracy bloggers have been extremely effective at using underhanded means and the superficial medium of the internet to fabricate “proof”.

This is a chapter or book of its own.

Another common discourse that serves to criminalize rioting is the idea that breaking the law, rioting, or using “violence” is a privileged activity that puts oppressed people in danger. Taking advantage of the fact that people in a Black Bloc are often so well masked that it is impossible to tell their race or gender, some aficionados of identity politics have made the claim that Black Bloc anarchists are all white males, even coining the term “manarchists” to describe them. To ridicule this idea, someone created the website, Look At These Fucking Manarchists (http://latfmanarchists.tumblr.com/), featuring hundreds of images of riots and armed struggles from around the world, showing women, people of color, people with disabilities, transgender people, and queer people building barricades, fighting with police, burning banks, or physically defending themselves, juxtaposed with ironic captions. A picture of armed women from an anarchist militia in the Spanish Civil War is captioned, “C’mon manarchists, fascism has to be fought by using our nonviolent feminine wiles, not hypermasculine aggression!” A photo from a February 2013 protest in Bolivia in which people in wheelchairs fought with riot police after traveling hundreds of miles to the capital was captioned, “This week in Bolivia, a bunch of ableist manarchist rioters clashed with police forces over the country’s broken welfare system. Don’t they know that fighting cops is really privileged and fucked up?”

... I'm sure the blog he referenced is actually engaging with the ideas that a lot of people have regarding manarchists and the toxic masculinity within movement spaces.

I'm sure they, like Peter, have actually listened to some of the legitimate complaints people have made and have taken them seriously.

... Nah, why would they bother when they can make flippant attacks and refuse to engage with the arguments of people who have genuine grievances? Why bother when they can make people look stupid instead of actually caring?

Identity politics were also used at Occupy Oakland to divide participants, preserve the mediating role of NGOs and professionals, and discourage direct attacks on the system.

Conversations around identity politics are necessary, especially with regards to how they can be deployed as a means of silencing people or to neglect other issues (e.g., overlaps between marginalised groups that go neglected in favour of focusing on one identity or aspect of an identity), but I cannot take this conversation of Peter's seriously when he refuses to engage with genuine critique about 'manarchists' and flattens everything by using an equally as flippant Tumblr (which honestly looks like he or his friends made it).

... It's really hard to focus on reading any of this when he jumps around and repeats himself so much. I honestly don't understand why people like his work. Even when he has a decent point, it gets muddled in the mess.

Chapter: Real Democracy Now By: Peter Gelderloos (2016) related tags: #tFoN

This whole chapter focused on the 15M movement and Real Democracy Now, but I don't think it engaged in actually analysing much.

Nonviolence in the 15M movement, as in so many other movements, meant amnesia, the suppression of a collective memory of struggle and all the experience and wisdom that comes with that memory. People who remember hundreds of years of struggle against authority cannot be tricked into a simple reform that promises to make things better by changing the election laws. People who remember hundreds of years of struggle know that what little they have, they won by fighting. They remember how to make barricades, how to assemble molotov cocktails, how to use guns, how to survive in clandestinity, how to protect themselves against infiltrators. Just as the reformists of Real Democracy Now erased the true history of the uprising in Egypt, full of street battles and burnt police stations, they tried to erase the rich history of anticapitalist struggles in Spain. They tried to tell people who had spent their lives in the streets that the only way to win was to be peaceful because that’s what the television says.

I think part of why I find Peter's book so hollow/shallow is that he doesn't want to do the hard work of finding all the connections. I know someone would be like “but that's not the point of his book,” but it actually is. If he wants to discuss how coerced nonviolence operates and from where it gains its “power” over people, he needs to look at how people are routinely force-fed the narrative of “how things are.”

The coerced nonviolence, even by its advocates, in our organising spaces is not merely the result of those advocates (as much as his book keeps trying to lay it primarily in their laps). He superficially recognises the systems that promote it, but he fails to give them their primary responsibility. As a result, it creates hollow sentiments that—despite whatever truth they may hold—can be easily broken down or utilised against his own argument.

It is no coincidence that in precisely those places where social struggles were still alive and well—Barcelona, Madrid, the Basque country—nonviolence failed to control the movement. In cities that did not have strong social movements at the outbreak of 15M, the indignados bought into the reformist and nonviolent discourse en masse, and often disappeared after about a month.

Such as this superficial statement. Why is it that Barcelona, Madrid, and Basque country are “places where social struggles were still alive and well?” What makes them 'special' in comparison?

I'm not even necessarily agreeing entirely, but this is a question that he does not answer. It becomes a circle. The struggle is alive, ergo they know how to use a diversity of tactics... because the struggle is alive. We don't get an exploration of how they keep it alive (if they do) and what prompts them to be more willing to include combative techniques and strategies (and why that is... and also just how they do it).

This is what I mean when I keep saying this book is superficial.

Given that most of these hundreds of thousands were fresh off the couch and new to the streets, the situation confirmed our argument that authority trains people in nonviolence whereas experience trains people in an antagonstic approach, but it was frustratingly slow going.

Cute way to imply that these folks were lazy rather than (as most people in the so-called “under classes” are) busy or tired from the sheer exhaustion of existing. Maybe we shouldn't insult newcomers, accidentally or not.

The first time I was ever assaulted in a protest, it was not at the hands of the police but by a peace cop, a pacifist appointed to prevent disorder in a protest. This is a logical extension of the nonviolent position. A fundamental tenet of nonviolence is that it is legitimate to impose a singular method and a limited set of tactics over an entire movement. This is authoritarian thinking.

I think there is a better way to analyse this sort of behaviour because it's not inherently a “logical extension” of the nonviolent position, but it is authoritarian thinking that a lot of people fail to consider. It's a logical extension of not recognising what violence is.

When anarchists reserved the sound system and the central space in the plaza to hold a debate on nonviolence, the paper on which the reservation was written down suspiciously disappeared. When they reserved it again, it disappeared again, and a new paper appeared with another event written down for the same day and time. Without the sound system, no more than 100 people could participate in the event, which had to be held on the margins of the plaza.

Okay, but was the reason for them doing this because it was a debate about nonviolence or because the people were anarchists? That would at least give us a good way of understanding what they were doing, why they were doing it, and then being able to point to their actions.

Chapter: Nonviolence Against Dictatorship By: Peter Gelderloos (2016) related tags: #tFoN

Paid hacks in the media, universities and think tanks make the distinction that democratic elections are “fair and free” whereas the elections that confer office on dictators are manipulated.

Interesting that he says this but is now, in 2026 (and has been for a while), relying on academics to weasel him into spaces. Regardless of whether it was paid or not, how does a person with zero academic qualifications get to even do a guest fellowship at an Austrian university? And why would someone critical of academia and what it does to the work of others offer to do the work for academia?

I don't know, but the irony is quite large here. (And I know academics who are critical of academia, but at least they're honest about what they're doing there. Joy James openly states that she knows the academy captures and requires people work on things that don't surprise them; others point out that they're there for a paycheck. But it's weird to be so vocal about this and then just... hand something over, no notes and no discussion. Is it for the credibility? The access to audience?)

I can't even disagree with this, but I find these critiques even more shallow with future information.

By ousting a dictator and demanding elections, a nonviolent movement allows a government to clean its image, rebuild its legitimacy, and mask a smooth transition to a more powerful form of government as though it were some kind of grassroots revolution or responsiveness to popular pressures.

Regardless of the veracity of this statement, it'd be a better use of time if we explored why and how this phenomenon happens.

The government of China successfully crushed the nonviolent Falun Gong movement, torturing to death 2,000 or more practitioners, and they used equally harsh methods to put an end to the peaceful Free Tibet movement, which can hold concerts with popular bands in the US and Europe but inside occupied Tibet people can’t even get away with hanging up a picture of the Dalai Lama.

Questioning the choice of using the Falun Gong without qualifying who they are, which also makes what China did/does to them look more heinous (especially since we should be seeking to help people leave cults rather than torture them for being part of one, and it ensures that very few people would/will not leave Falun Gong because they had/have no safety net to fall back on).

However, Falun Gong (which operates Epoch Media Group) has been supporting far right movements and conspiracy theories in their “exile” from China. They are actively working against the liberation of many people and actively support eugenics...

... Which was known before fucking 2016, Peter. I know this because I lived in China; I also know this because, prior to living in China, I had friends who left this very cult. So this group that you use as an example of “nonviolence not working” is very literally a group that had other motives and is currently supporting heinous governments. Cool.

Ironically, the unwritten part of Gene Sharp’s method—reliance on businessmen, international media, and powerful governments—is the only thing causing an impact, as the Burmese government slowly begins to liberalize. But because it is the Burmese state’s desire for investment and not the actions of oppressed Burmese people that is achieving this liberalization, the operative concern is what is good for the Burmese elite, what will help them get richer, what will help them cement their power in the eyes of “the international community”. Given that the desire for cheap labor in southeast Asia is explosive, we can imagine just what a “free” Burma will look like.

I know anger is what we should be feeling, and I can usually handle snarky texts... but this is exhausting.

All of this is correct, but I'm so tired of not analysing what it actually means and just stating it without ever looking at what's happening and how. That's all this book is... just statements. There's no real analysis.

The case of Belarus, one of the failed Color Revolutions, is particularly interesting. The rulers of Belarus have little interest in cultivating business relations with the West, because their economy is fully integrated with Russia’s. Elite support, that secret weapon of the Color Revolutions, could not make a showing here, and the police did not have their hands tied in dealing with demonstrators.

Peter, what? Elite support could not make a showing in fucking Belarus? Do you not know who was benefiting from that economic entanglement with Russia? Maybe you should, I don't know, consider that there are elites who aren't from the US... lest you sound like a fucking Stalinist who can only do “America bad, everyone else good” bullshit.

The Milgram experiment, in 1961, demonstrated most famously how people would follow orders from an authority figure that went against their conscience, even it meant torturing and killing.

Footnote 51. Someone didn't bother to double-check whether what he learned about the Milgram experiment was true or not, huh.

I know we still teach it as true, but the replicability of this study is dubious, difficult, and therefore unlikely. In his own research notes, Milgram often ignored that a significant number of people who did administer the first shock dropped out upon hearing the other person say that they were in pain.

This is like when teachers complain about kids not being able to sit still, and it's really just two kids in the classroom who are pretty fucking mobile and feel like they're 'everyone' on some days.

Anyway, this footnote goes with this:

Countless psychological studies have demonstrated that institutional power succeeds in making its members feel free of responsibility and immune from any pangs of conscience.

Other than the Milgram experiment, he... includes nothing else. What are the other “countless” psychological studies, Peter? Did you find them? (From 2018, but here's an article from 2012 that also mentions Gina Perry's book on the subject.

He's not wrong that institutions make their members feel free of responsibility, but it's also largely related to their distance from the problem. That's why automation has been such a boon; if a computer makes a choice based on set criteria, you're not responsible for the problems that happen. It's when people are forced to see the results of their actions that they start reckoning with their actions. We also see this in the use of drones in the military. We see far more guilt in soldiers who've had to use face-to-face tactics than we do soldiers who've pushed buttons on a desk. That is far more useful and interesting than continuing the myth of Milgram's research.

However, democratic governments tend to tolerate nonviolent movements, to keep them around, because such movements can be most useful to those in power.

Honestly, he'd benefit from Joy James's conversation on the captive maternal. Weird that I've never seen him reference her in later pieces, lol.

Chapter: The Color Revolutions By: Peter Gelderloos (2016) related tags: #tFoN

I'm already frustrated by this engagement in focusing on “colour revolutions,” which... Again, it feels like denying the agency of a lot of people and ignoring the realities of what's up on the ground... and shit in Western EU, the US, Canada, Australia... never gets called out for being similar in the same way, as “colour revolutions.” This is largely because we already get “Marxist-Leninists” (who refuse to acknowledge they are, in actuality, Stalinists) making these claims while they ignore the agency of local people, the desires of local people, and the ways that these governments are oppressive.

They might make choices you hate, but not everything about every movement is funded by the US or the rest of the imperial core (which somehow never includes Russia, despite Russia still maintaining a lot of imperial and colonial structures)... and it would also mean that we have to look for the ways in which even the movements we don't classify as “colour revolutions” have had interference and funding by external governments who benefit from those movements.

The main “Color Revolutions” have already been mentioned: Serbia’s “Bulldozer Revolution” in 2000, Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” in 2003, Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” in 2004, and, following a slightly different model, Lebanon’s “Cedar Revolution” and Kuwait’s “Blue Revolution” in 2005.

Time to dive into fact-checking, but I'm going to bet that there were key elements of all of these that go unchecked and ignored because... that's what he does, honestly.

It's worth recognising that people in a position of privilege who end up “leading” these movements (regardless of where they receive funding for) are weaponising disappointment that people already feel. Something that Peter hasn't engaged in was discussing who Slobodan Milošević was and what he (and his government) did that might prompt people to look to any solution they find (like how Serbian nationalism was utilised within his government and by people who were under his rule, fueling increased repression of Muslims and the genocide of the Bosniaks).

Not to mention, when discussing anything about Yugoslavia... would've been good to recognise that the Western powers were initially supporting (or at least looking away from) Milošević until they “just couldn't” any more. (And this article makes assertions about Europe being the puppet of the US in this time because they were “militarily weak,” which is... largely bullshit, if we're honest. They try to make the comparison to the US staying out of shit in WWI, and that's just not the complete story. Also ignores how Western Europe routinely colonises and engages in imperialism of its neighbours.)

If anything, Milošević looks like part of a different pattern.

Although Otpor activists seem content to give him all the credit—they were, after all, personally trained by Gene Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute—they also drew on numerous characteristics of Philippine’s 1983-86 Yellow Revolution, not explicitly dealt with in FDtD. The specific configuration of tactics they chose served as the undisputed model for all subsequent Color Revolutions.

I'm going to say that I haven't found anything where most Otpor! activists gave Gene Sharp all of the credit, but I have found sources that say that “some students” utilised his book (From Dictatorship to Democracy). However, if you look at the kinds of sources that are largely available? It's all from organisations and institutions who benefit from promoting this book (and I'm not even talking just about state institutions; it's people who literally benefited materially from the promotion of Sharp's work and people who benefited from being able to create workshop-creating organisations).

Let's see if any of that gets addressed.

It’s no coincidence that every single Color Revolution has replaced a government that had a close relationship with Russia with a government that wanted a closer relationship with the United States and European Union. Each and every Color Revolution received positive media coverage in Western media, usually beginning before the revolution had even started, so that the public was already trained to think of Ukraine, Georgia, or Kyrgyzstan as a corrupt regime in need of changing.

Just going to highlight that this is a particularly bizarre perspective for an anarchist. It ignores what Russia did and does, even if it's not exactly on the scale of the other powers. (And again, it ignores the agency of people who do participate, the propaganda about democracy in comparison to Soviet-style “communism” (or other authoritarian communist regimes)... It ignores that there are always unhappy people, including whole demographics who are repressed because of their ethnicity...

An anarchist should recognise both as being bad, regardless of who is worse.

And in every case, the organization responsible for conducting the so-called revolution received funding from progressive capitalists like billionaire George Soros, or from US and EU governmental institutions like USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, and Freedom House.

Gene Sharp’s own think tank, the Albert Einstein Institute (which trained activists from Otpor in Serbia and Pora in Ukraine), receives funding from some of these same institutions. The AEI refutes the charge that they are funded by the government. Stephen Zunes, writing in defense of Sharp for Foreign Policy in Focus, claims that “Absolutely none of these claims is true […] Such false allegations have even ended up as part of entries on the Albert Einstein Institution in SourceWatch, Wikipedia, and other reference web sites.” On SourceWatch, we find the information that AEI has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the International Republican Institute, and the National Endowment for Democracy (the first name should be well known to readers, the latter two are funded by the US Congress). Are these false claims? Buried in a single paragraph in the middle of his 42-paragraph article, Zunes mentions in passing “a couple of small grants” from the IRI and the NED. Evidently, these allegations are not so false after all. We also find the interesting tidbit that Gene Sharp’s doctoral dissertation was funded by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.

These are more interesting pieces of information than... anything else he brings up prior. It also would focus a better conversation that should be had: that of co-option, both by people within the movements and people outside of them.

Democracy is merely another way to organize exploitation, oppression, and social control. Democratic governments have coexisted with slavery, colonialism, warfare, the most patriarchal societies with some of the most unequal concentrations of wealth, the destruction of the environment, starvation, extreme poverty, the pathologization or murder of trans people, labor exploitation, job and housing precarity, homelessness, exclusion from healthcare, genocide, and any other bad thing we can think of. The most brutal forms of poverty and the worst destruction to the environment have occurred since democracy became the predominant form of government on the planet.

This is just annoying because he's not entirely wrong, but he's also not right either. You can't say that “the most brutal forms of poverty” have occurred since democracy because that requires... being able to actually create a lot of statistics to prove it and also neglecting entire parts of history (and I'm not comfortable trying to Oppression Olympics history because I think we're all capable of recognising things as bad and holding multiple thoughts in our heads). I'm not denying that democracies routinely enable a lot of extreme and brutal forms of poverty (because they do), but you're not going to convince me that other forms of government wouldn't be doing the same thing should they be the dominant global form (monarchies seem to do quite well, authoritarian “communist” regimes have done well at this).

There are better questions to be considered here than what he's implying and kind of ignoring for the sake of some simple, punchy rhetoric.

And it's not just by adding more simple, punchy rhetoric and going WELL, IT'S CAPITALISM. Because yeah, but that's not the full story, either.

It's also wild for him to frame it like this, and I'm saying that as someone who isn't pro-democracy (because I recognise that our democracies only feign what they claim to be—as an immigrant, it's hard to believe in democracies when they're allowed to exclude me because of where I was born and where I my passport's from; it's weird to be told that I shouldn't have a say in whatever happens where I live simply because I'm not a citizen, as if that makes what they do less impactful on me). Maybe it's because many of these other governments existed with less ability to surveil people in the way we've had in my lifetime, but I'm pretty sure this is less about democracy (even if there is a better conversation to be having regarding democracies, which he's undermining with most of this book).

Governments can be democratic or not, more or less corrupt, but they will still pursue the same basic goals, and they will still be controlled by an elite. Government by its very nature concentrates power and excludes people from making decisions over their own lives.

Even if this is all he has to say on it, this clearly indicates that he knows he should've framed this differently. And that this is the better conversation, which he's fine with skimming over.

The line between democracy and dictatorship is fictitious. Whatever difference there is is primarily one of formalism and ritual. The two classes of government are often interchangeable, and when a government changes from one to the other, many of the same people tend to stay in charge.

At least he acknowledges this, but it keeps coming too late.

More than anything else, democracy is a good business model, and it has always been spread by invasions or bourgeois coups. The contradiction is in using the masses to overthrow one government (one that has become an obstacle to business) without letting them lose their respect for government or think they could overthrow it again on their own initiative.

I'm going to be a broken record, BUT THIS IS THE MORE INTERESTING TOPIC. Why does he waste so much time on dodgy rhetoric that he later denounces?

By being exclusively political movements that only seek a legal reform or a change of politicians, they can accomplish no real change.

Just going to wait for him to actually recognise that what he labels Colour Revolutions... are often seeking the same thing as people within the US. I can remove this sentence from this whole thing, and it sounds just like the goals of movements in the US (some of which that he claimed were largely successful).

He isn't inherently wrong, but the explicit Cold War structure of his argument is questionable.

Compare a violent (Tulip) and nonviolent (Orange) Color Revolution, and you will find there is no difference in the results. In both cases, the movement accomplished a regime change, and within a couple years, everyone was disillusioned because the new government proved to be the same as the old government. This is an especially critical observation, given how proponents of nonviolence frequently insist that the presence of violence exercises an almost magical effect in turning on police repression, driving away support, or reproducing authoritarian dynamics. In a direct comparison between two highly similar political movements, we see that violence is a non-factor. If the pacifist hypothesis were correct, we would see quite different results between the Tulip Revolution, where people rioted, beat up cops, and took government buildings by force, and the Orange or Rose Revolutions, where people were entirely peaceful. That difference is absent. Violence is a false category. It is only a question of what actions are effective at overcoming structures of power without reproducing them.

This is the final paragraph of this chapter, and it's infuriating because it highlights so many of the things I keep complaining about: It highlights his failure to actually discuss the interesting aspect of the issue (if a violent revolution and a nonviolent revolution end up in similar results, what should we be talking about?), it re-highlights the dichotomy he claims is false (violence is false? so why have a nonviolence vs violence discussion, which you're having regardless of what you call it because you won't leave someone else's rhetorical ground), and... suddenly changing the goals of the conversation (in that these two revolutions are the same, so pacifists are wrong!).

... This paragraph highlights how weird the structure of this rambling book is.

Chapter: The Revolutions of Today By: Peter Gelderloos (2016) related tags: #tFoN

After demonstrating that the historical victories of nonviolence have not been victories from a revolutionary standpoint, that they did not bring an end to oppression and exploitation, they did not fundamentally change social relations, much less create a classless, horizontal society, one often hears the rebuttal, But violence has never worked!

It would benefit your argument to actually shift the perspective, rather than do whatever he's going to do “from an anarchist perspective.” The problem here is that they aren't wrong that those violent revolutions didn't necessarily work, but they're wrong to think it's because of the violence.

The problem is that he's going to do this:

Moving past the moralistic simplemindedness contained in the belief that “violence” is a method, this statement conceals an important fact. Unlike the proponents of nonviolence, we (and here I only mean to speak for anarchists who believe in revolution, though many other anti-authoritarian anticapitalists as well as indigenous people fighting for their freedom from colonialism may identify) have never claimed victory. We have pointed to specific battles won, ground gained, or small steps ahead as sources of inspiration and learning, but we are not trying to offer easy solutions, cheap hopes, or false promises to anyone. If we liberate ourselves in one area, all we gain will be lost again unless the State is defeated on a worldwide scale.

He's not going to look at what the flaws were and to actually create arguments that would highlight what their downfalls were. He just says that all “nonviolent revolutions” didn't work (without analysing what aspects were helpful and which weren't) while saying that their superficial retort (or his strawman) is the rebuttal... and he needs to just acknowledge that none of them have worked but they all have had useful elements and harmful elements.

This failure of analysis (maybe that's what the book should be called) does little to prompt people to recognise the true issues.

Supporters of nonviolence claim Indian independence as a victory for their method, whereas anarchists who support combative methods do not claim the Russian Revolution as a victory. Why should they? Although they participated, along with other currents of struggle, the world they talked about did not come about, and in fact they were slaughtered as other elements took over the revolution. Things clearly changed in Russia, but it was not an anarchist change.

Speaking of a superficial argument.

Tangent: I hate how most of his footnotes are further polemicising when he could actually point to real sources of information, like... his own research. This is a common frustration between both books.

By chalking up the failure of the revolutions in Russia, Spain, China, Cuba, and elsewhere to one simple factor, the revolutionaries’ use of this thing called “violence,” they save themselves the need for any nuanced, thorough historical analysis. Nonviolence, in sum, encourages superficiality, false expectations, dishonesty, and sloppy thinking.

Honestly, Peter, I've been waiting for you to engage in anything resembling the opposite of these characteristics you attribute to nonviolence. I'll probably remain waiting.

Social scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan are the authors of a study that is among the only statistical analyses of the effectiveness of nonviolence. Like many social scientists before them, they use statistics to obscure more complex truths.

Criticisms that can be applied to him, too.

They do not use revolutionary criteria for success, and in their mind the “Color Revolutions” and many other reformist, dead-end, or self-betraying movements were successful.

This may well be true (I haven't read their work), but it's also worth noting that he doesn't provide an understanding of what he thinks “revolutionary criteria” are. He also doesn't engage with why people think these “reformist, dead-end, or self-betraying movements” succeeded; we'll see if he engages in that analysis, which would be an analysis of the self-replication of views that these people were schooled in for decades.

Although they rate campaigns as objectively violent or nonviolent, they do not define violence, and they also uncritically use loaded terms like “the international community”.

Again. More criticisms that can be levelled at him, especially since he won't define terminology that he needs to define.

They credit nonviolence with victory in cases where international peacekeeping forces, i.e. armies, had to be called in to protect peaceful protesters, as in East Timor, and they define victory simply as the achievement of a movement’s goals, as though movements ever had a consensus on their goals.

His critique on so-called “peacekeeping” forces is correct, but I think it bizarre to say that the lack of consensus means that we can't see if a movement's goals were achieved... Especially in light of the fact that he thinks a vague definition of revolution is fine enough for people to work together.

I agree that this isn't whether or not a movement is successful, but he has to pick some shit to remain consistent with. If he can't be consistent on a similar point, then I find it strange when he critiques it.

** !! INTERLUDE !! **

I also think it interesting that he doesn't point out some really easy criticisms of the beginning of Chenoweth and Stephan's Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. They open with the following:

IN NOVEMBER 1975, Indonesian president Suharto ordered a full-scale invasion of East Timor, claiming that the left-leaning nationalist group that had declared independence for East Timor a month earlier, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin), was a communist threat to the region. Fretilin’s armed wing, the Forças Armadas de Libertação Nacional de Timor-Leste (Falintil), led the early resistance to Indonesian occupation forces in the form of conventional and guerrilla warfare. Using weapons left behind by Portuguese troops, Falintil forces waged armed struggle from East Timor’s mountainous jungle region. But Falintil would not win the day. Despite some early successes, by 1980 Indonesia’s brutal counterinsurgency campaign had decimated the armed resistance along with nearly one third of the East Timorese population.

But they do not account for how the violent repression by the Indonesian government was possible due to Jimmy Carter's support (this may be a new article, but we've known for a long time that he supported Indonesia).

Peter had some really easy points that he neglected almost entirely in their narrative of what happened. He loves talking about “Color Revolutions” and whatnot, but he never wants to actually add in the critiques where actual intervention was done in favour of the oppressive regime.

Chenoweth and Stephan's book seems pretty shoddy from this paragraph alone, and it doesn't entice me to read further.

!! END INTERLUDE !!

From footnote 22:

The 1965 “Correspondent-Inference Theory” they cite explains how an observer infers the motivations behind an individual’s choices. They do not mention the highly individualized scope of the study when they trot it out as proof for a geopolitical argument. Ironically, research around the theory demonstrates that observers often overlook or underestimate the situational, socioeconomic, and institutional factors that may constrain a person’s choice.

This is, once more, something where he could provide that research. Just because other people force him, as he complains, to hunt down research... doesn't mean he should do it for others. It's infuriating.

Also, he complains that they “provide no evidence,” and he is also guilty of the same thing for his own audience.

They also make convenient use of non sequiturs...

Things he's also done, such as the entire final chapter of How Nonviolence Protects the State. So he can recognise it in other people's work, but he fails to recognise it in his own?

All the subsequent arguments in the paragraph, which are rhetorical arguments lacking any documentation or data, refer to the topic sentence of the paragraph.

... The irony of him saying this in this fucking book with so few citations makes me want to scream so much.

Anyway, I think it's quite interesting that Peter didn't engage with this simple fact (from Erica Chenoweth's Wikipedia page):

Together with Maria J. Stephan, who was then at the U.S. Department of State, Chenoweth co-wrote the book Why Civil Resistance Works.

I wonder why someone working at the US Department of State would participate in the writing of such a book and what a professor at Harvard (or dean, as of 2023) could provide them in that partnership. None of these critiques are engaged with.

In sum, the four basic criteria are: 1) whether a movement seized space for new social relations; 2) whether it spread an awareness of new ideas (and secondarily if this awareness was passive or whether it inspired others to fight); 3) whether it had elite support; 4) whether it achieved any concrete gains in improving people’s lives.

If these are his criteria for, you know, whether a movement is a success... I don't think we're going to be in for any pleasant surprises. It's also clear that he's going to include as successes things that, in later years, would also find themselves struggling under other pressures, which he couldn't have predicted but... could've still seen as being tenuous in their existence.

One case study Peter uses is the “Oka Crisis” (known to the Mohawk peoples as the Kanehsatà:ke Resistance, so it's a bit weird that he doesn't use the name that Indigenous peoples have given it). He measures it on his above criteria saying:

1) It succeeded in seizing space. 2) It spread ideas of indigenous sovereignty and inspired many others in North America to fight back. 3) It did not have elite support. 4) The golf course expansion on their lands was defeated, and the conflict came to a dignified conclusion for the Mohawk.

I'd disagree on the first point, which is that the Government of Canada purchased it and still holds it, never having made an effort to transfer ownership (unsurprising). People involved still point that things in Canada “have not changed,” even as the Kanehsatà:ke Resistance did bring awareness to the struggles of Indigenous peoples across the continent and elsewhere.

Also, what is considered a “dignified conclusion?” And do all Mohawk peoples agree on this point?

He continues this for other events (over 30) and creates a section that is, quite honestly, tedious to read and unengaging. I suppose boring your audience with a poorly written list that includes varying explanations for different events is a good idea.

And in some cases, he openly admits that he can't even apply his own criteria to the events in question... and then does it anyway, which is confusing. For example, he does this for the First Intifada, where he states:

From a distance, I cannot venture to say whether the struggle opened up more liberatory spaces than the reaction closed down.

And then states in his criteria:

1) The intifada seized and defended spaces.

And while these may not be contradictory (seizing and defending spaces doesn't mean they're inherently liberatory spaces), it is bizarre to include it in this manner (because people are likely to focus more on what he says toward the end of each 'case study').

Anyway, I don't feel the inclusion of these “case studies” does much for him in terms of creating examples. This is largely because by doing it in the way he opted for, he effectively removed ability to actually engage with what was happening and the full history. They're written as blips and nothing more.

On the sixth of December, 2008, Athens police shot and killed a teenager in the largely anarchist neighborhood of Exarchia.

I wonder if Alexandros Grigoropoulos had a name or something, Peter. Hmmm.

There are some cases, like the Libyan Civil War, where he doesn't think it right to use his criteria... and doesn't. But doesn't fully analyse them in any useful capacity. The quantity over quality is so frustrating.

3) Inside China, the movement did not enjoy elite support, but government and media organizations throughout the rest of the world were overwhelmingly favorable to the movement.

In talking about the Hong Kong Democracy Movement, he states this and doesn't even bother to analyse what it meant and why. Then he has the audacity to call other people lazy. This is exhausting.

And while I find that the support of those elites created trouble, it does nothing to engage with their Sinophobia and perpetual development of anti-China propaganda. The HK Democracy Movement (any of them) could've been explicitly anarchist, and the West would've found some way to recuperate and co-opt it as a means to fight against China (and then would've found other ways to put HK in their place, once they got to make use of them).

Subjecting the successes and defeats of social rebellions and revolutionary movements to a rigorous scientific objectivity destroys what is most valid in them and produces only the illusion of knowledge.

Peter loves doing this thing where he, like... Does a thing (excessively) and then is like “See? It's bad!” Which is such an obtuse way to make a point. This is because you're already formulating thoughts and he rug-pulls you, and it's not in a way that makes it beneficial.

What it ends up looking like is him agreeing to a scale of “analysis” and prompting the audience to at least tacitly agree with it... and then doing the “Well, aren't you stupid for thinking I was serious?”

I hate it.

Beyond these four criteria, we have seen that peaceful movements are much more likely to fade away after winning a token gain like electoral reform, whereas combative movements are more likely to continue in the pursuit of deeper, more meaningful social changes; combative movements are more likely to be connected to a critique of capitalism and state authority whereas nonviolent movements hold democratic government, regardless of actual conditions, as the absolute good; movements with the greatest participation tend to display a diversity of tactics, whereas strictly nonviolent movements tend to be smaller or shorter-lived (bringing huge crowds together for a protest, but rarely for more extended action); within the time period under examination, nonviolent movements have never been able to stand up to military force, whereas under certain circumstances, combative movements have been able to defeat the police and military; democratic as well as dictatorial governments sometimes do use lethal force against peaceful protesters, contrary to pacifist claims that governments cannot effectively repress nonviolent movements because public opinion would prevent them.

I feel like both the “nonviolence advocates” and Peter are doing the same thing from opposite directions. There is no evidence of either of them enacting “lasting movements,” and it's also presuming that all movements are permanently required. Some movements have smaller and short-term gains (which are movements that generally operate as part of a larger whole); other movements are going to be longer-lasting for various reasons.

The only thing that I agree with him on is that they should engage in a diversity of tactics, which is the most important aspect of all movements. Peter has even stated that this is the most important element (and thus renders the dichotomy of nonviolence vs violence false), but he perpetually moves back into the rhetoric of that dichotomy (which puts him squarely on the field developed by people who enforce the behaviours that he's speaking against).

Although nonviolent organizers frequently claim that protesters who use combative or illegal tactics ruin “their” protests—clearly demonstrating an ownership issue—anticapitalist protests in which people damage corporate property, fight with police, and interrupt the spectacle of social peace or disrupt whatever elite summit world leaders have planned, are clearly more effective than protests in which people get arrested, carry out civil disobedience, hold witty placards, but do not go on the attack.

These are the points he should be focusing on the most and fails to do so because he refuses to leave their rhetoric behind. The ways that people view ownership of a protest and the impact of those views is a necessary conversation to have, but it gets glossed over in favour of what he things are witty jabs.

But it's also silly because these don't have to be mutually exclusive ways fo doing protests. You can see the combative tactics in the same places as you find the arrests; you can see them in the same places as people carrying “witty placards.” Civil disobedience is a term that should be recuperated by the people engaging in all disobedience, especially as a lot of the combative tactics emerge as responses to quieter forms of that disobedience. Peter should be making those linkages, and he's just... not. This whole thing hinges on utilising a dichotomy that he already said isn't real.

Also, I find it bizarre that he'll use “illegal” as part of his terminology despite the fact that illegal is just as vague and meaningless as he says “violence” is (actually, I'd think it's more vague and meaningless considering how a lot of obviously legal actions get collapsed into being illegal just because someone says they are despite the laws stating otherwise... and the State gets away with it because that's literally the point). How he ignores this aspect here while claiming the other one is truly baffling to me.

Compare the various antiglobalization protests in Washington, DC or New York City between 2000 and 2004—where there were huge crowds but little or no rioting—with the the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. No one even remembers the former anymore, whereas the latter is often referred to (incorrectly, but capitalism tends to have a corrosive effect on memory) as the birth of the antiglobalization movement.

No one remembers the former, says the person who is clearly remembering the former.

Also, a lot of people don't remember the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle and have to constantly be reminded of them. There's a reason for this, and it is the erasure of history that all movements endure (and is something that he should also be writing about here, seeing as he thinks one of the criteria for a movement's success is related to the spread of information).

This is especially the case when it is self-evident that those tactics deserve the lion’s share of credit for the victory activist leaders subsequently wish to manage. If it was the union march that was the most decisive, important element in the Seattle protests, the element that inspired the most people across the country and energized a new cycle of struggle, why did union activity only continue to stagnate in the aftermath of the Seattle protests? If it was the nonviolent civil disobedience, was there a boom in such practices after the whopping success outside the Kingdome?

Both of these questions are things that can be handled in historical research, if he even bothered to try. And I don't think either of the answers would involve any conversation on nonviolence vs violence. In fact, it would be a more compelling discussion (especially in light of his claims about Rebecca and David Solnit... and other apparent nonviolence advocates). The questions he poses and then sidesteps in order to, once again, stand on the rhetorical field given to him... are the ones that would actually provide an interesting conversation.

But Peter wants simple, even if simple doesn't serve him or even a broader conversation about anything.

This is not to say that we must be ever grim and serious, nor that our only activity is to smash. Just as we need the full range of tactics, we will express a thousand emotions in our rebellion, from street festivals to funeral marches to riots.

STOP DOING THIS SHIT. Stop arguing from one field and then ending chapters in the DID YOU THINK THE PREVIOUS WAS SERIOUS? WELL, HERE'S WHAT I REALLY THINK at the end. It's so fucking annoying.

How do people take him seriously when he DOES THIS ALL THE TIME? Ugh.

Chapter: Recuperation is How We Lose By: Peter Gelderloos (2016) related tags: #tFoN

Sometimes we meet in the streets—in protests, occupations, demonstrations, festivals, talks, and debates—and sometimes we are separated by a wide gulf in our practices. What we have in common is that we want to fight against the current state of things, but we don’t even agree on how to phrase this. Some would say we want to liberate ourselves from colonialism, others that we want to abolish oppression, and others that we want to change the world. One person might say we are working for social justice, and others, myself for instance, would counter that justice is a concept of the ruling system.

If Peter would spend time looking into etymology, he might actually find that the concept of “social justice” isn't inherently rooted in the “concept of a ruling system” and that the word justice has multiple uses across the English language. This isn't exactly a complex thing to understand, but it is an intentional misrepresentation that doesn't make any sense at all.

This can be seen in that we can ask if something is “just.” Now, if he wanted to argue that it has relationships to religion (as “just” often had connotations of being “righteous in the eyes of God”), that would benefit him.

This is merely one example of how I hate the way he plays with language without actually engaging with the multitudes of definitions at play, which is really just his lazy rhetoric (and also his refusal to think about things through more than one facet of their existence). It'd be better to point to the genuine ambiguity of terminology like “social justice” and how it can be collapsed into concepts of the judiciary (and thus the state), but we have to simultaneously acknowledge that many people aren't using “justice” to imply a use of legal framework and do mean it as “rights” or referring to something being “righteous” or “equitable.”

Even though revolution is a term with many definitions, it is informed by experiences of the struggle we often share. This vague commonality, the fact that we are on some level struggling together even though our reasons and concepts differ, is why we can criticize one another’s concept of revolution without necessarily agreeing on what revolution means: because concepts inform practices, and practices meet with different results when they are put to use in the streets. When these results are counterproductive, sometimes we refuse to see our own failings and need to hear criticism from a different perspective.

Ironic, given the author's behaviours.

Also, why is it acceptable that there are so many definitions of “revolution” and that we can work together despite not having an actual shared goal? That's exactly how this reads. If one person wants to struggle to give power to the proletariat and I want to struggle to rid the world of states/borders, it doesn't mean that we're sharing the same goal because we both “seek revolution.” Those are two separate revolutions.

Please look at anarchist history related to things like the Kronstadt rebellion (with revolutionary rebels fighting 'revolutionary' Bolsheviks...) or even Makhno and the Black Army. There are far more across time and space, but there are numerous examples of one “revolutionary” group fighting against another... which means that this “vague definition” is actually equally as important as discussing the false dichotomy of nonviolence/violence.

Despite lacking a common definition of revolution, we can criticize the nonviolent vision of revolution for betraying that nameless refusal, that urge for freedom we all have inside of us.

I disagree entirely with this for the above reasons. This is nonsensical if you refuse to hold the discussion you're claiming to want.

Through collective debate, we can dismantle visions of revolution that do not live up to their pretenses of being either liberating or realistic.

As an anarchist, Peter should recognise entirely how often anarchic visions are deemed as “unrealistic” (and often framed as impossible). It doesn't matter that they are often entirely possible (but that people don't want to explore ways to do them out of a refusal to move from certain status quo aspects), but that defining of anarchic visions as “unrealistic” is part of the propaganda against us.

This is ridiculous coming from an apparent anarchist.

The end result of this debate is not a single definition of revolution nor a common, correct practice, since we do not represent a homogenous humanity with the same needs and experiences. The result is a multiplicity of practices that are more intelligent and more effective, and that either complement one another or clearly evince the unbridgeable chasm between themselves.

Again, this sounds okay on the face of it, but that refusal to recognise what different groups deem as “revolutionary” mean that we're likely to be working with people who would be fine with seeing us dead or jailed, and that doesn't bode well. There's a reason the CNT and the varying ways that people engaged with politics didn't work (and still haven't). If he'd read the essays he suggested (including the one that was about Spanish insurrectionaries), he might actually have recognised those issues.

It also seems weird for an apparent anarchist who has lived in Barcelona to, uh... Not recognise those ruptures and how that has created stagnation, a lack of direction, and a lot of sabotage by people holding onto their positions, which have been present there for decades.

It's not that we can't negotiate what these terms mean and what we want to do with each other, but it's nonsensical to behave as if it makes sense to frequently align ourselves with other “revolutionaries” who seek revolutions that still deny liberation to others (which, for example, many Marxist revolutions do).

This is equally as important to acknowledge as our own tactics, and it's weird that Peter downplays that here.

The present criticism of nonviolence, therefore, does not seek to convert its adherents, but to disprove their pretenses, suggest new directions for those interested in a revolution against all forms of domination, and let them make up their own minds.

While insulting them and their intelligence.

Many proponents of nonviolence try to say, more pragmatically, that “violence” is simply less effective, but they have no historical revolutions to show, and therefore no basis for claiming effectiveness. When pressed to answer for the violent revolutions that were successful in overthrowing a particular government, they will almost always claim dissatisfaction with the revolution in question due to its authoritarianism, a quality they often blame on the means used to bring it about.

Why are you relegating the interesting parts of the conversation to sniping in footnotes (this is footnote 15). It's so annoying that he doesn't engage in the parts that actually make the argument interesting and worth having but likes to polemicise on the most tedious aspects.

The government of India continued to mete out humiliation, exploitation, beatings and killings after the victory of the supposedly nonviolent independence movement. In the United States, the desegregated South continued to preserve white supremacy northern style, through gentrification, judicial lynchings, structural discrimination, and other measures. And in recent years, where the “Color Revolutions” have forced out the ruling political parties in Serbia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and elsewhere, we still find government corruption, police brutality, the forcible exclusion of common people, and widespread apathy.

In this section, he cites himself (read the other nonviolence book for discussion on India and the Civil Rights Movement! ... which were badly handled there, to be honest).

Is he honestly taking “Color Revolutions” seriously, which also implies that a lot of people in those places didn't want to change the governments? And fails to engage with the kinds of propagandisation that were done to support “pro-democracy” movements, which were not only at the hands of Western governments but were part of the 'New Ruling Class'—often members of the old guard, despite being “New”—who wanted to incite that change for themselves? Because when USians use “Color Revolution,” it often is utilised in a way that denies the agency of the people who are there and seeking difference (even if that difference is later recognised for the sham it could be).

Government violence is not the result of violent revolutions, but the product of government itself. Any movement that leaves the State intact will fail in ending the oppressions we are fighting against. A nonviolent movement that replaces one government with another—and this is the greatest victory a nonviolent movement has ever achieved in the history of the world—ends up betraying itself, allowing Power to change its masks without addressing the fundamental problems of society. Nonviolence as an analytical tool has no means of understanding this kind of defeat—the kind that looks like victory.

The problem with this is the insistence on “any nonviolent movement” that replaces the current government with another, when it's... any movement. A Marxist “revolution” that places the proletariat in control of a government is not necessarily better for everyone and still will mask a lack of change.

This is applicable regardless of strategies used, and his refusal to engage with it shows a clear failure to understand the dichotomy his book is premised on as being false (and therefore useless as an analytical tool).

When evaluating the possibility for a revolutionary social change, it is necessary to set our sights on a complete transformation that does away with coercive hierarchies of any kind, including governments, capitalism, and patriarchy.

All hierarchies are inherently coercive. What are you, Peter? Noam Chomsky with his justified hierarchies?

This book is not only for anarchists, but it is written from an anarchist perspective, based on the belief that no matter how people understand their problems, rising up to solve them will necessitate conflict with the State, and those problems will not be solved until the State is destroyed.

I'm not sure how considering there is a considerable lack of anarchic analysis, and he relies heavily on Marxist analysis without even critiquing how that might impact his own anarchist principles or understandings.

For more on counterinsurgency, see Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue; or How Nonviolence Protects the State, p.106.

Footnote 17. He's not inherently wrong in the assertion this footnote is related to, but the fact that he cites himself and cites a known abuse apologist makes it interesting. Do you have no other sources?

Nonviolent activists very rarely talk about recuperation, and some would say this is because they tend to play the role of recuperators.

Not inherently incorrect, but he's also not going to discuss the ways that they may not play into the system but can still be recuperated by it in some capacity. Francisco Ferrer is a fun example, in that he was executed by the state and is now plastered over a lot of Spanish state-connected organisations. He, on his own, may not have been someone who was a recuperator, but the state still saw the ability to do this to him and thus the anti-clerical movement associated with him.

I don't know whether or not he would've been classified as 'nonviolent', but they can do this with anyone. And it's not just the state that can recuperate (or, to put it better, co-opt) these people and symbols. Che Guevarra and Frida Kahlo are two people who've been commercially co-opted, despite their anti-capitalist beliefs.

It's not just nonviolent activists, and this kind of co-optation needs to be explored in detail. Peter, however, doesn't want to see the connections between the two.

Recuperation is the process by which those who rebel and break away from current power structures are induced to rejuvenate those power structures or create more effective ones. They either turn their rebellion into the mere symbol of rebellion, as a way to exorcise whatever anger or discontentment led them to rebel, or they direct it against only a small part of the system, creating a change that allows the State to function more effectively overall. Recuperation is when countercultural movements like punk or the hippies become just new ways of buying and selling, new product lines, a new niche within the diversity of capitalist democracy. Recuperation is when workers’ movements around the world form political parties that enter into government and sell out their base, or when labor unions come to convince workers of the needs of bosses, for example accepting voluntary pay cuts for the good of the company. Liberation movements in India, South Africa, and many other countries were recuperated when they decided to seek common ground with their colonizers and fight for a new government that would carry out all the same economic projects of the old government, reserving themselves the special role of local managers for international finance.

Like, he's not fully wrong here, but he's missing the key component that it's not always they are “induced.” It's also not always them doing that work of fucking over their movements. His inability to see this makes it impossible for him to accurately understand what's happening (but does make it possible for him to play his blame game in polemic form).

NGOs profit constantly off the State’s need to recuperate popular rage. Rich donors and government agencies give away huge amounts of money to pay dissidents to feel like they’re making a real change in the world by running services that constitute a bandage on the gaping wounds of poverty and structural violence, while training those in need to passively accept aid rather than fighting to change their circumstances. Thanks to charity, the powerful can throw some crumbs to those who wait obediently, allowing them to more effectively crush those who rise up to create change directly.

Who is doing this recuperation, Peter? How is it operating? You've got some of the functions of how NGOs (especially charities) operate, but you're missing huge components of what is happening and who is doing what.

You're also missing that the NGOs, despite the name, are part of the State and that many state actors (e.g., former presidents) run their own NGOs to syphon off the same kind of activism and work. They're not “profitting off the State's need to recuperate,” they are actively working with the State to operate in the ways they do.

The Civil Rights movement in the US was recuperated when it was convinced to fight for voter registration instead of any material equality or meaningful freedom. The independence movements in India and South Africa were recuperated when they set their goal on new capitalist states that played by the same rules that had enriched investors during the colonial or apartheid regimes. Popular outrage in Ukraine, Serbia, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, and other countries that experienced the “Color Revolutions” was recuperated when they identified their enemy as one specific political party, and declared victory when a new political party came into office, even though none of the structures that caused their poverty and powerlessness had changed. Nonviolence played a key role in all of these processes of recuperation by enabling dialogue between powerholders and movement leaders, by preventing people from taking power into their own hands, giving them instead an ideology of glorified powerlessness, and by ensuring peacefulness and stability in critical moments of transition from one form of oppression to another.

I honestly think this isn't good enough analysis of how that recuperation occurred. I also think being able to understand the “nonviolent” revolutions through specific examples would make it clearer, and he doesn't do this. Like, a great example would be to check out the Velvet Revolution and how these changes occurred and later influenced Czechoslovakia (and later Czechia and Slovakia).

It's necessary to actually understand how they operate rather than just say that they were “co-opted” or “recuperated.” If you're going to claim that they were color revolutions, it doesn't actually engage with who was driving them or how (but it implies they were bought and paid for by the West, without ever looking at the agency of people living there—every revolution is likely going to see foreign influence, and we have to be mindful of that while not acting like these people have zero political engagement with the world around them).

It's also necessary to engage with people's views on what has happened since those “nonviolent” revolutions. There are a lot of people who have critically reflected on the changes since them, and it is worth engaging with their work to understand it. Does Peter do this? (No. The answer is usually no.)

Anyone who believes in revolution needs to have an analysis of recuperation and a strategy for how to keep their rebellion from being twisted to suit the needs of the State.

Personally, I think more people need to engage with Joy James on this topic because she's rightfully critical of academia and academic capture, even as an academic. She's been putting out this kind of work for years now, and I guarantee there was something she'd written or discussed that he could've referenced.

But it's also worth noting that the state is going to twist things as much as they want, and it's not that we can prevent that. It's that we need to have a strategy to handle it and a response to it. If the state can recuperate the most well-known figures of a movement who would've been working against it in their deaths, the state will co-opt anything. (And if they can't do that, they'll do everything they can against it.)

None of this is a conversation that needs to happen in a nonviolent vs violent strategies discussion.