I don't know how much to expect out of a chapter that opens like this:

Patriarchy is a form of social organization that produces what we commonly recognize as sexism. But it goes well beyond individual or systemic prejudice against women.

Thanks. Didn't know that at all. (I know I'm being snarky on this, but it's just frustratingly obvious, and it was in the late 2000s. I would've felt the same reading it then, as a person who is more overtly and recognisably impacted by patriarchy.)

(Many perfectly healthy people do not fit into either of these physiological categories, and many non-Western cultures recognized — and still do, if they haven’t been destroyed — more than two sexes and genders.)

This is a weird ass way to talk about this. “If they haven't been destroyed” doesn't even make sense, even for cultures that historically would have recognised more than two genders but no longer do. Is it a form of destruction? Yeah, but I think being more explicit so that it doesn't sound like these cultures ceased existing would be more beneficial. “Forcibly altered by colonialism” is right there, for example.

After all, in wars, in social revolutions, and in daily life, women and transgender people are the primary recipients of violence in patriarchal society.

How I just want to hold up a mirror. As a note: It's interesting that Peter says this, but he's very well-known for fighting against KYLR and saying that abusers deserve therapy. I wonder why that is...

If we take this philosophy out of the impersonal political arena and put it in a more real context, nonviolence implies that it is immoral for a woman to fight off an attacker or study self-defense.

I guess those are the two options. Study self-defense or fight off an attacker (but anything outside of that is inappropriate).

From another angle, nonviolence seems well-suited to dealing with patriarchy. After all, the abolition of patriarchy in particular requires forms of resistance that emphasize healing and reconciliation.

Huh.

Valuing healthy relationships is complemented by militantly opposing institutions that propagate exploitive and violent relationships, and striking out against the most egregious and probably incorrigible examples of patriarchy is one way to educate others about the need for an alternative. Most of the work needed to overcome patriarchy will probably be peaceful, focused on healing and building alternatives. But a pacifist practice that forbids the use of any other tactics leaves no option for people who need to protect themselves from violence now.

It's very interesting how the prior chapters incorporated a lot more of the violent machismo, and this one is suddenly... “Well, some violence is necessary in these very specific cases, but actually? This one will probably be peaceful.”

Peter, your book sucks.

In the case of rape and other forms of violence against women, nonviolence implies the same lessons that patriarchy has taught for millennia. It glorifies passivity, “turning the other cheek,” and “dignified suffering” among the oppressed. In one of the most lucid texts defining the preservation and implementation of patriarchy — the Old Testament — story upon commandment upon parable upon law counsel women to suffer injustice patiently and pray for the divine Authority to intervene. (This prescription is remarkably similar to pacifists’ faith in the corporate media to disseminate images of dignified suffering and motivate the “decision-making authority” to implement justice).

This prescription is remarkably similar to all state institutions, you absolute doofus. A person takes a rape case to the police, and they are harassed and told they must have misunderstood. A person tells their university about being raped, and the university frequently works to obfuscate that rape. This is not a fucking pacifist problem; it's a problem with the whole fucking apparatus, and it doesn't help because you're not pointing at any pacifist examples of this shit.

Are they out there? Yeah. But you've got to stop pretending that they're explicitly the problems here because it is not a problem of pacifists (though pacifists exacerbate the problem); it is a problem of the whole goddamned system.

However, the women’s violence that hooks discusses is not a political, conscious violence directed against the agents of patriarchy, but, rather, an impulsive displacement of abuse aimed at children and others lower in the social hierarchy. This is one example of a true cycle of violence, which pacifists assume to be the only form of violence.

THIS IS A SYSTEMIC VIEW, NOT A PACIFIST-SPECIFIC VIEW. How did people read this book and think he was some brilliant anarchogod, I swear.

Also, I do not subscribe to the view that “hurt people hurt people.” Can they? Yes. But it is not because of their abuse. How often do we hear people try to explain away the abuse they commit with the abuse that they endured? As a person who was abused, I know better than to abuse someone else... So I don't. “Hurt people hurt people” supports patriarchy, and that is why it is so commonly brought up by men who are accused of being abusers.

To be more specific, if women organized collectively to forcefully attack and oppose rapists, specific rapes would be prevented, the trauma of past rapes would be exorcised in a constructive and empowering way, men would be denied the option of raping with impunity, and future rapes would be discouraged.

We can collectively organise to forcefully attack and oppose rapists? So KYLR, right? (Except no. Peter says no and has done so many times, attacking anarchafeminists who even so much as breathe those letters.)

Pacifists and reformist feminists have often charged that it is militant activists who are sexist. In many specific cases, the accusation has been valid.

See things Peter can't be: Specific. There are criticisms of both pacifists and reformists of all kinds, but you don't get there by grabbing a social generalisation and pretending those groups are the dominant groups who started it.

Whether militant or pacifist, nearly every tactical or strategic discussion I have participated in was attended and dominated overwhelmingly by men. Rather than claim that women and transgender people are somehow unable to participate in a broad spectrum of tactical options (or even discuss them), we would do well to recall the voices of those who have fought-violently, defiantly, effectively — as revolutionaries.

How about all the people who aren't perceived or acknowledge as being men that were literally run out of many of these organisations? Want to consider that?

He puts up examples of groups of women who literally... left other movements because those movements didn't give a shit. Doesn't seem to try to explore why they might have left those movements, and it's not because they were pacifist. But it is largely because they would not deal with their misogyny and sexism. It's the same story for the history of Mujeres Libres (as problematic as they could be).

There is, however, a great deal of feminist literature that denies the empowering (and historically important) effects of militant struggle on women’s and other movements, offering instead a pacifist feminism. Pacifist feminists point to the sexism and machismo of certain militant liberation organizations, which we should all acknowledge and address. Arguing against nonviolence and in favor of a diversity of tactics should not at all imply a satisfaction with the strategies or cultures of past militant groups (for example, the macho posturing of the Weather Underground or the anti-feminism of the Red Brigades).

While I'm sure there are feminists pushing a pacifist-only agenda, have we considered that part of the “violence = machismo” is because the kinds of people pushing violence constantly (especially cis men) don't often stop and consider all the nonviolent work that needs to happen to support movements? That's literally part of the criticism, not that violence is inherently masculine.

Now I feel like I have a shit-ton of resources to read to contextualise this nonsense because I'm willing to bet some of those “pacifist feminists” were being read in bad faith because it looked like they supported a pure nonviolence.

As for one resource, it's Carol Flinders... promoting a lot of popular bullshit evolution stuff. It's cute that he takes Flinders to task (which people should) and leaves the more popular purveyors of this rubbish alone (and the most popular purveyors? are predominantly men). Following this is a short focus on Patrizia Longo.

Both probably should be critiqued, but I find it interesting to ignore the ways in which varying movements continually uplift men and shut out everyone else, using them more as examples of bad beliefs when necessary... and as examples of sacrifice and care work if they're not negative examples.

Short chapter, says little. Disappointing but not surprising.

I'm going to predict that, out of all these chapters, this is likely to be... the better one because it enables Peter to ignore things he sucks at talking about. It might also be one of the few places in which his love for citinig listserv emails can help him, even though there are most certainly articles that've been written across all media sources that'd... y'know... make the case better. (First citation of the chapter, btw, is a listserv email.)

And based on the sheer number of references to Ward Churchill, whether you like his work or not? It'd be better just to read that and get a more comprehensive piece that doesn't basically repeat exactly what Churchill wrote but with updated references that you can't even have a chance to access! I'm not a fan of Pacifism As Pathology, but it is far better than this trite bullshit. And at least it's openly Marxist in a lot of ways, which Peter... Peter says he's coming at this from an anarchist perspective, but I keep getting Marxist vibes. That's not to say anarchists can't learn from Marxists, but it is to say that there's nothing specifically 'anarchist' about this when he's cribbing from one person who definitely isn't.

Again, the references to Mumia's We Want Freedom, which is a book worth reading. However, it's making me wonder how widely read Peter decided to be at this time (and how widely read he remains now... we'll see if I torment myself with future entries). I can say that he added no further information to the references in the updated version of this book despite doing a ton of weird (mostly superficial but negative) edits to the text for the re-publication. He could've easily added more references to build his case (and actually engage with more than a few people)... and he chose not to.

We can take their word for it. FBI COINTELPRO documents, revealed to the public only because in 1971 some activists broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania and stole them, clearly demonstrate that a major objective of the FBI is to keep would-be revolutionaries passive.

When this book was originally published, the people who did it hadn't yet come out about it. (I think that happened in 2014.) But the updated version (which again, has a lot of edits to the style, structure, and sometimes organisation of a whole chapter and looks to have been re-published in 2018) doesn't even make any changes or notes to expand upon new information. I find this weird.

After smugly noting that Malcolm X could have fulfilled this role, but is instead the martyr of the movement, the memo names three black leaders who have the potential to be that messiah. One of the three “could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white, liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence)” [parenthesis in the original].

First: I don't get why he doesn't cite where a person could find this information. It's in a memo that was released; there's documentation of it. Let people go back to the original to, y'know, learn more.

Second: This is why I find his refusal to define “nonviolence” at the beginning disingenuous and nonsensical. If he led with this chapter, he would've also been able to make a good case without people having to figure out what counts and what doesn't count. This one line from a COINTELPRO memo highlights precisely what kind of people and what kind of nonviolence. Ugh, it's so annoying because a good editor could've actually made the decent points stand out.

I'm also guessing Peter uses this for the parenthetical because he doesn't focus on the 'obedience' aspect and what that means, which is kind of funny... when that makes his point stronger. Granted, I'm also guessing that this entire chapter is cribbed from another Ward Churchill project (Agents of Repression)... because the citations are full of that (upon investigation, it feels like what a student does for an essay they have to do research for—they read one book, make an outline, and use that book extensively; having skimmed the book in question, it seems far more interesting to the point than this does).

He does this thing again, this time citing Frantz Fanon (so this quote isn't Peter):

The colonialist bourgeoisie introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they....Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed...before any blood has been shed.

This just proves to me that he should've opened with this chapter instead of refusing to define “nonviolence” (which he needed to do, regardless of whether he wanted to or not). It also would've kept things much clearer, which he also manages to do repeatedly by pointing at the actual target of his ire: pacifists. The organisation of this book creates some really troubling conflations, which he doesn't help in previous chapters because he frequently conflates nonviolent work (i.e., work where violence isn't the main goal) with pushes for total nonviolence in the midst of a struggle.

This underlying comfort with the violence of the state, combined with shock at the “outrages” of forceful rebellion, lulls pacifists into relying on state violence for protection. For example, pacifist organizers exempt the police from the “nonviolence codes” that are common at protests these days; they do not attempt to disarm the police who protect peace protesters from angry, pro-war counter-demonstrators. In practice, pacifist morality demonstrates that it is more acceptable for radicals to rely on the violence of the government for protection than to defend themselves.

The irony here is that many of the people who do this at protests wouldn't necessarily label themselves as pacifists. Pacifists definitely do this, but a lot of liberal “left” groups do, too. From my own experiences, I watched groups organising solidarity BLM marches in my (non-US) city. First, they did not work with some of the most frequent targets of state and police violence where I live (Romani people); second, when we finished the march portion through the walkable downtown and got to the final stage, the organisers told us if there were any problems... to report to nearby police. A solidarity march for people being brutalised and murdered in the US by police... was fine with putting its safety into the hands of cops.

When questioned, they didn't consider themselves pacifists. But they bought into the same propaganda that pacifists did. (This is also why he needs better framing around 'nonviolence'. His focus is clearly meant for pacifists, despite the titling of his book and chapters. It becomes super muddled because he doesn't want to do the work of defining things like 'nonviolence' or recognising that pacifists aren't entirely responsible for the propaganda they've imbibed... Which causes a ton of conflation that just makes his points feel hollow.)

During and after World War I, the American Legion was an important paramilitary force in helping the government repress anti-war activists and labor organizers, particularly the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers of the World). In 1919, in Centralia, Washington, they castrated and lynched Wesley Everest of the IWW.

Upon investigating this footnote, it's interesting to see something without much evidence (even from the side of the IWW prisoners/defendents and their own lawyer, who didn't mention it at all) being put down as inherent fact. Where did this come from? There's no mention of it. And while I'm not keen to take state sources at their word, I find it interesting that people who were very close to Everest's dead body said nothing about the mutilation at all. (Possibly, Ralph Chaplin? But Peter cites nothing, so...) He's not wrong about the American Legion, but I don't like embellishing with unfounded information.

Pacifists claiming to eschew violence helped to desegregate schools and universities throughout the South, but, ultimately, it was armed units of the National Guard that allowed the first black students to enter these schools and protect them from forceful attempts at expulsion and worse. If pacifists are unable to defend their own gains, what will they do when they don’t have the organized violence of the police and National Guard?

Not wrong on pacifists helping to desegreate schools, but... Do you want to give examples or just ignore everything? Are you complaining about white pacifists here or are you getting upset at people like Erna Prather Harris? And while people probably can (and did) critique her, I feel like this flippant throw-away comment is doing very little in the way of actually having that conversation (and a question isn't a conversation).

Institutional desegregation was deemed favorable to the white supremacist power structure because it defused a crisis, increased possibilities for co-opting black leadership, and streamlined the economy, all without negating the racial hierarchy so fundamental to US society. Thus, the National Guard was called in to help desegregate universities. It is not that hard to imagine a set of revolutionary goals that the National Guard would never be called in to protect.

This also feels like a throwaway. Literally, whole books have been written by Black historians (and Black people, in general) that have criticised what desegregation/integration did in varying spaces. Like, if we check out what happened to Black teachers (for example) as a result of integration, we find that children had far fewer of them and that many of them lost their jobs or were pushed elsewhere after integration. (While this video came out well after, I'd still recommend checking it out for Yhara Zayd's discussion on integration. She's not even focusing entirely on integration, but she's fucking talking about it and not throwing it away as a kind of gotcha for her point.)

Bloomberg got political points for being hip and lenient, even as his administration cracked down on dissent during the week of protests. Pacifists got an added perk: anyone wearing the button would be given discounts at dozens of Broadway shows, hotels, museums, and restaurants (highlighting how the passive parade of nonviolence is tapped into as a boost to the economy and bulwark of the status quo). As Mayor Bloomberg put it, “It’s no fun to protest on an empty stomach.”

But is playing into this kind of thing a commonality among pacifists? You haven't shown that, but you have assumed it. Since this doesn't happen with regularity, I would bet it's not on many people's radar as why they'd be a pacifist or even a perk to being one.

A huge amount of energy was expended weeks in advance (by the institutional Left and the police) in attempts to alienate and exclude more militant activists.

This is more goal post shifting. You started strong on pacifists, but now we've moved to “the institutional Left” (and police)... who may not overlap all that much with pacifists.

A few of these citations are uh... Really hitting the whose who of anarchist abusers and misogynists.

... Also, this book could've been an essay.

I had to take months off of reading this because I kept getting trapped in reading (sometimes better) sources that Peter used (and also misrepresented). For someone who gets a lot of praise for this book specifically to this day, it often feels like people... didn't bother reading it or didn't bother reading past it. Anyway...

I do not mean to exchange insults, and I use the epithet racist only after careful consideration. Nonviolence is an inherently privileged position in the modern context. Besides the fact that the typical pacifist is quite clearly white and middle class, pacifism as an ideology comes from a privileged context. It ignores that violence is already here; that violence is an unavoidable, structurally integral part of the current social hierarchy; and that it is people of color who are most affected by that violence. Pacifism assumes that white people who grew up in the suburbs with all their basic needs met can counsel oppressed people, many of whom are people of color, to suffer patiently under an inconceivably greater violence, until such time as the Great White Father is swayed by the movement’s demands or the pacifists achieve that legendary “critical mass.”

This opening paragraph annoys me because the first sentence is about nonviolence and then moves on to pacifism. One of the things that I do not like is this constant conflation between the two; in order to be nonviolent, you do not need to be pacifist. At least Ward Churchill said what he meant in the title of his essay; it's like Peter can't do that because then we'd know the entire first chapter is basically ripped straight from it.

I can say that I agree that, in many cases, pacifism does come from a largely privileged position. I don't think that it's a position that comes out of only white suburbs, though; if I were to think that, I'd have to revisit the previous chapter only to learn about Gandhi's specific form of pacifism and what it was actually designed to do (or, preferably, read better books critiquing Gandhi and/or discussing the history of both partition and independence in Indian, Bangladesh, and Pakistan).

Amusingly enough, I feel the need to point to later Gelderloos beliefs seem to support nonviolence as a means of handling abusers. He has spoken repeatedly against KYLR, he claims therapy heals abusers (despite all evidence to the contrary of it supporting abusers, especially if they're men—and he dogpiles people who know more than he does in the process of being incredibly wrong).

All of which is to say that there are valid critiques of nonviolence, but it should be clear (even in his own positions and behaviours) that nonviolence and pacifism are two separate things.

People of color in the internal colonies of the US cannot defend themselves against police brutality or expropriate the means of survival to free themselves from economic servitude. They must wait for enough people of color who have attained more economic privilege (the “house slaves” of Malcolm X’s analysis) and conscientious white people to gather together and hold hands and sing songs. Then, they believe, change will surely come. People in Latin America must suffer patiently, like true martyrs, while white activists in the US “bear witness” and write to Congress. People in Iraq must not fight back. Only if they remain civilians will their deaths be counted and mourned by white peace activists who will, one of these days, muster a protest large enough to stop the war. Indigenous people need to wait just a little longer (say, another 500 years) under the shadow of genocide, slowly dying off on marginal lands, until-well, they’re not a priority right now, so perhaps they need to organize a demonstration or two to win the attention and sympathy of the powerful. Or maybe they could go on strike, engage in Gandhian noncooperation? But wait-a majority of them are already unemployed, noncooperating, fully excluded from the functioning of the system.

Again, a lot of this isn't wrong, but I do feel like this is less a critique of pacifism itself and more a critique of liberalism and liberal democracy. Can we stop and ask from where these beliefs stem that these pacifists tend to believe and focus on? Because this sounds exactly like what you'd hear coming out of the mouths of politicians in most governments.

This point feels weak because it so obviously is intertwined with a violent institution that both peddles it and benefits from it, and Peter made no attempt to even connect the two at all.

Also, it's weird to see positive views on Gandhi who, in the previous chapter, caught a lot of criticism for his pacifism and its negative impacts on Indian independence.

Nonviolence declares that the American Indians could have fought off Columbus, George Washington, and all the other genocidal butchers with sit-ins; that Crazy Horse, by using violent resistance, became part of the cycle of violence, and was “as bad as” Custer.

This is just my snark, but he can recognise the nonsensical nature of this... and yet does abuse apologetics on the regular? Okay.

But also... No, nonviolence doesn't say that because nonviolence isn't the ideology. Pacifism is, and it keeps feeling really weird every time this sort of conflation happens. We have plenty of nonviolent means to resist, even if they are met with violence. Food distribution, community centers, gardens, etc... All of these are 'nonviolent', but they don't have to be pacifist.

Pacifists must know, at least subconsciously, that nonviolence is an absurdly privileged position, so they make frequent usage of race by taking activists of color out of their contexts and selectively using them as spokespersons for nonviolence.

Pair this with a line further down the paragraph:

Nelson Mandela was too, until it dawned on white pacifists that Mandela used nonviolence selectively, and that he actually was involved in liberation activities such as bombings and preparation for armed uprising.

So again, nonviolence isn't the problem that he keeps pointing to. There's no ideology of nonviolence, and nonviolent strategies still hold possibility and potential. The problem he's seeing is pacifism as an ideology, and he refuses to maintain that position by continually conflating the two. (This could have been easily solved if, for example, an editor for wherever this book has been published had explained to him what his rhetoric was doing. Or if he cared. I can't be bothered to pretend that he cared.)

For example, nonviolence cannot refuse to “recognize that it can only work for privileged people” because nonviolence is the strategy. Pacifists, however, can refuse to recognise that a hyper-focus on nonviolence (or nonviolent strategies) can only work for privileged people. It's like actually pointing fingers in the right directions would make for better arguments and less conflation between two things that are not the same.

I also love these footnotes for “evidence” because there's no real way to corroborate them. For the point on Mandela:

In one conversation I had with a pacifist Mandela was held up as an exemplary person of color and abandoned just as quickly when I mentioned Mandela’s embrace of armed struggle.

I can't corroborate this conversation with a pacifist and if it really happened or is Peter's version of a straw man. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. But it's a common structure of footnote throughout the book, and I did explore at least one of them because I could find the remaining sources (even if Peter removed them from updated books, like this argument he has with Spruce Houser).

Similarly, the footnote following it just has “Jack Gilroy, e-mail, January 23, 2006” at the beginning and then explains an entire listserv conversation. Its likelihood of being real is high, but I also find it interesting just how many of these more private things are being put up as the points to argue with (especially when there have always been very prominent examples happening even within anarchist book fairs that get written critiques that can be linked to and referenced).

There was another footnote that I wanted to discuss, but it kept getting too long and unwieldy for this post, so it's all here in this tangent.

In an internal memo, the FBI addresses the need to prevent the rise of a black “messiah” as part of its Counter Intelligence Program.

While I don't doubt this for a second, this is where a footnote would've been good for curious readers. On top of this, it could make the inclusion of Alex Haley (who has had charges of working with FBI/CIA assets to manufacture a narrative) very interesting. This is also part of why I think Marable's interview on Democracy Now! is strange; they talk about whether or not Haley knew the person he worked with (Alfred Balk? I think) was working with an intelligence agency. Marable says that he must've but that we have no evidence. This was said by Marable more than 20 years ago, btw.

I know that personally, despite being interested in history and taking advanced placement US history classes throughout my years in some of the better public schools in the nation, I graduated high school knowing little about Malcolm X, other than that he was an “extremist” black Muslim. However, as early as elementary school, I knew quite a bit about Martin Luther King Jr. To be fair, Malcolm X is as important, if not more important, a figure to the civil rights and black liberation movements as King. In subsequent years, my political education in progressive white circles failed to correct either the white-out of Malcolm X or the misleading hagiography of King. It was only upon reading in black activists’ writings of the importance of Malcolm X that I did the necessary research.

This is in a footnote discussing how white activists (“particularly those interested in minimizing the role of militant and armed struggle”) play active roles in the minimizing and erasure of the memory and history of Malcolm X. I find it interestting that he supposedly graduated knowing little about Malcolm X other than a made-for-white-TV narrative, while my white flight high school (it was part of a community that developed out of white flight from a nearby city) still managed to teach me about him (they did keep the narrative that MLK and Malcolm X hated each other, but they did outline who Malcolm X was and what he did). Maybe Virginia was behind Illinois in correcting the history? Because Peter's not that much older than me, and I graduated in the early 2000s.

Darren Parker, a black activist and consultant to grassroots groups whose criticisms have contributed to my own understanding of nonviolence, writes...

Finally, we get a name! Except, the footnote for what Darren writes: “Darren Parker, e-mail, July 10, 2004.” This is one of those things that I loath about Peter's work. Very rarely do we get anything of interest dropped that we could all access and engage with. If I simply look up Darren Parker today, I am led to Grey's Anatomy wikis and information. This doesn't help me to learn anything. While I'm glad he at least names a Black activist (something Peter rarely does unless they agree with him or can make his points for him, if we're honest with his breadth of writing across many platforms), it'd be nice to be able to engage with their work. I can't engage with a consultant I don't even know how to find. (If I try a search for “Darren Parker” and “Black activist,” I get this SF Chronicle article about a man who is deceased and worked for the Democratic Party's African American Caucus. Is this the same person? I'll never know!)

What Darren said isn't wrong (that the habit of quoting MLK is off-putting to Black people because they know what he did in terms of the race struggle), but this is a frustrating pattern for Peter that gets on my nerves.

Thus King’s more disturbing (to white people) criticism of racism is avoided, and his clichéd prescriptions for feel-good, nonviolent activism are repeated ad nauseum, allowing white pacifists to cash in on an authoritative cultural resource to confirm their nonviolent activism and prevent the acknowledgement of the racism inherent in their position by associating themselves with a noncontroversial black figurehead.

One more time, this is not purely a problem of pacifists. Please, align your criticism correctly. Do pacifists use it? Yes. But who else benefits from it, Peter? Who else is more likely to have engaged in this manufactured narrative and it perpetuating across the country? Do you think pacifists are responsible for that, or do you think it's white supremacist leadership in a liberal democracy? Because I'm pretty sure it's the latter, with the pacifists imbibing the same lessons we all got. (Let's also go back to Peter's footnote about his school days. Was the history curriculum he received the fault of pacifists or was it the fault of the VIOLENT state who benefits from that narrative? Which is the chicken, and which is the egg?)

The pacifists aren't guiltless, but we can at least be honest about how the world works.

However, there is a Eurocentric universalism in the idea that we are all part of the same homogeneous struggle and white people at the heart of the Empire can tell people of color and people in the (neo)colonies the best way to resist.

Oh, so we can do it, but we can't figure out how pacifists (who are not a dominant majority, btw) aren't at the helm for the development of such absurd and racist propaganda.

The people most affected by a system of oppression should be at the forefront of the struggle against that particular oppression, yet pacifism again and again produces organizations and movements of white people illuminating the path and leading the way to save brown people, because the imperative of nonviolence overrides the basic respect of trusting people to liberate themselves.

Peter, the fucking anarchist movement has a lot of white men trying to lead the way forward in places like the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe (and even Latin America, despite their desire to pretend they're not Euro-descended when it benefits them). You want to sit and think about how this is part and parcel of white supremacist patriarchy or nah? Hell, when I did work with small anarchist groups in Taiwan, white men kept trying to override people instead of sitting the fuck down and listening. White cis men love the status that comes with being white cis men; white people love the status that comes with being white people. (Also, Peter, you're a white man trying to be at the forefront of anarchist movements... Hmmm...)

Whenever white pacifists concern themselves with a cause that affects people of color, and resisters among the affected people of color do not conform to the particular definition of nonviolence in use, the white activists place themselves as the teachers and guides, creating a dynamic that is remarkably colonial.

Broken record time but: THIS ISN'T JUST LIMITED TO WHITE PACIFISTS. PLEASE LOOK AROUND YOU.

Of course, this is largely a function of whiteness (a socially constructed worldview taught diffusively to all people identified by society as “white”). Militant white activists can and do incur similar problems when they disrespect allies of color by dictating the appropriate, orthodox method of struggle.

THIS IS ALL YOU NEEDED TO SAY. Everything said about pacifists is moot because literally? This right here? Is what you should've been focusing on. This is not a problem limited to pacifists, and it is an egregious error in thought and presentation to waste so much time and space acting as if it is to then rug-pull your idea. Just say what you mean, put it front and center, and stop waffling like you've got a bigger point to make when your point is literally that WHITE PEOPLE CARE MORE ABOUT WHITENESS THAN LIBERATION OF ALL. What an absolute limp pool noodle of a thought leader, goddamn.

Today, their veterans are not dead or imprisoned (excepting three victims of an early explosives making accident and those who left Weather to fight alongside members of the Black Liberation Army); they are living comfortably as academics and professionals.

Wonder if Peter realized he'd also be living in the academic circuit, propped up by the academics and professionals he snidely remarks upon here. (How else do you get a fellowship at an Austrian university without having any credentials to your name, which is usually a requirement for such a position? While I think that is an absurd requirement and one that helps no one, I find it interesting that Peter managed to do it just fine.) The irony drips like honey.

Many of the most vocal disdain ongoing liberation struggles, denouncing them as “not anarchist,” rather than supporting their most anti-authoritarian elements. The result is that these hard-core (and, at the same time, armchair) anarchists can find no real (and dangerous) resistance worthy of their support, so they stick to militant postures and the violence of ideological hairsplitting.

So says a man who loves doing ideological hairsplitting, especially when he's wrong. Particularly about matters he has little or no knowledge of at all. Hmm. Sounds like something that's part and parcel of white cisheteropatriarchy.

Also, most anarchists work in not-anarchist projects... Either because the anarchist projects around us are actively harmful in some way (anti-queer, anti-immigrant, anti-sex worker... ergo, not anarchist) or because we exist in such limited numbers that we have no other options if we want to do work that we consider important.

And not all resistance has to be dangerous. What is this macho posturing? Can nonviolent work become dangerous? Yes. But why should we seek out dangerous things just to support them? (Also weird to see this shit from a man who gets cranky if you bring up how therapy doesn't change abusers but helps them to abuse better or try discussing anything related to KYLR. Violence is only good when macho-posturing is done, I guess.)

Beneath their frequent and manipulative usage of people of color as figureheads and tame spokespersons, pacifists follow a tactical and ideological framework formulated almost exclusively by white theorists.

Irony of seeing this author routinely engage in doing this precise thing any time an anarcha-feminist challenges him. He can't walk the walk, can he?

Pacifists would also do well to examine the color of violence. When we mention riots, whom do we envision? White activists committing property destruction as a form of civil disobedience may stretch, but do not usually lose, the protective covering of “nonviolence.” People of color engaged in politically motivated property destruction, unless strictly within the rubric of a white activist-organized protest, are banished to the realm of violence, denied consideration as activists, not portrayed as conscientious.

This isn't wrong, but this is an example of the rhetoric that Peter should've been using throughout this whole fucking book to make his case. He desperately needed an editor, if I'm honest. If he had one, they did him a grave disservice with his milquetoast book that points fingers in the wrong directions for how the world operates. (e.g., Yes, pacifism can and often does support the state... but also, your problems are less with pacifism when you start talking about dynamics of oppression and being very general about them... and also ignoring the development of certain beliefs and how those beliefs permeate other spaces. When he does this at all, it feels like an after-thought.)

Violence and criminality are nearly interchangeable concepts (consider how comfortable pacifists are in using the terminology of statist morality — for example, “justice” — as their own), and a chief purpose of both concepts is to establish blame.

Have... you considered that being a pacifist doesn't necessitate that you're anti-state? And that propaganda that supports states has been wildly successful in many movements? There are even anarchists, people who should be ostensibly anti-state, who keep using rhetoric and terminology of the state and its morality. There are anarchists who see state institutions as unequivocal good, even when we can show they're not. So yeah, again. Not a problem of pacifism (but it is weird to think pacifists are inherently anti-state when most aren't).

Victim-blaming was a key part of pacifist discourse, strategy even, in the 1960s and 70s, when many white activists helped justify state actions and neutralize what could have become anti-government outrage at violent state repression of black and other liberation movements, such as the police assassinations of Panther organizers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Rather than supporting and aiding the Panthers, white pacifists found it more fashionable to state that they had “provoked violence” and “brought this on themselves.”

Yep. And again, this chapter would do more if you had specific examples of that rather than just stating a thing happened amongst pacifists that happened among a lot of white (and also non-white) people in the US and abroad. I've seen examples of white Marxists who also didn't want to support them... Victim-blaming is part and parcel of the white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy. That doesn't justify it, but that highlights the argument you have. It's not just pacifism, so it's on you to outline the precise ways this is happening within pacifiist movements. So far, all I'm getting is “pacifists mirror non-pacifist liberal democrats and are nothing better than pawns that do the work of those above them.”

One gets the impression that if more Gypsies, Jews, gays, and others had violently resisted the Holocaust, pacifists would find it convenient to blame that little phenomenon on the absence of an exclusively pacifist opposition as well.

Or one understands that most people try to erase the queers (not just gays), the Romani, and the disabled from the Holocaust all the fucking time, which does better for the state than to acknowledge the existence of these demographics.

Also, cute presumption that all Romani, queers, and disabled people went willingly with little to no resistance whatsoever. This is also a form of erasure, especially since he doesn't even address these demographics in his copy-paste of both Ward Churchill and Yehuda Bauer's discussion of the Holocaust... Well, it's weird to just drop them in here, y'know. Like they're props.

... Just mentioning the Kristian Williams citation. Ugh.

Hip-hop artists bonded to the major record labels largely abandon the glorification of anti-state violence and replace it with an increase in the more fashionable violence against women.

While there's a grain of truth here, can we also look at how other male artists (especially white ones) got away with it? Or do you want to sit down and consider who was willing to replace it with the “fashionable” violence against women? Idk, the inclusion of this hip-hop paragraph feels so out of left field. What's the point when you're talking about pacifists? Yeah, black resistance gave birth to music like hip-hop, but uh... It doesn't make sense to talk about here? And if there are connections, you're not making them. (Capitalism is a connection to everything. This is a paragraph about how white supremacist capitalism ruins shit and glorifies violence against demographics of people, like women. There probably is an explicit link to pacifism somehow, but Peter's not making it.)

It is exactly these stories of empowerment that white pacifists ignore or blot out.

Remind me again which white pacifist wrote the “state-sanctioned school textbooks,” Peter. I'll wait. This framing is actually harmful to the argument being made (which can be made), and it's so consistent that it makes me wonder how people read this and thought he was a stellar philosopher. It's confusing.

On April 20, 2006, a co-founder of Food Not Bombs (FNB), the majority-white anti-authoritarian group which serves free food in public places through one hundred chapters (mostly in North America, Australia, and Europe), sent out a call for support for the new FNB chapter in Nigeria.

I mean, you could have a whole chapter dedicated to the issues of FNB and nonviolence on its own. They have a statement; we know they are, and we also know they're state supporters (not entirely anarchists, regardless of how many exist within varying FNB branches). Honestly, I would've found it more compelling if Peter focused on their adherence to nonviolence and how it, specifically, supports the state. At least it would've been good for pulling FNB chapters up for promoting nonsense, especially as they are targets for state repression (because feeding people is bad, y'know).

Though, it does have to be said that feeding people vegan meals is going to largely be a nonviolent strategy. It is a nonviolent strategy that is met with further repression and does need a response (not just... letting it happen over and over, as the statement seems to imply). But that's not the direction Peter understands it from.

The contradiction in ostensibly revolutionary pacifism is that revolution is never safe, but to the vast majority of its practitioners and advocates, pacifism is about staying safe, not getting hurt, not alienating anyone, not giving anyone a bitter pill to swallow.

Not inherently wrong, but we'r'e shifiting goal posts again. “Revolutionary pacifism?” Weird inclusion to just toss in when he really hasn't prior.

Rather than “putting themselves in harm’s way” to protect members of the black, brown, and red liberation movements (a protection their privilege might have adequately conferred because of how costly it would have been for the government to murder affluent white people in the midst of all the dissension spurred by heavy losses in Vietnam), conscientious pacifists ignored the brutalization, imprisonment, and assassination of Black Panthers, American Indian Movement activists, and others.

Idk, if we listen to people like Joy James, I have a feeling we'd be told that a lot of people did this and that it was not just a white pacifist attitude. Leonard Peltier didn't spend decades in prison only to be givenn house arrest (not even a pardon, thanks Biden) because of a dedicated group of white supremacist pacifists, and I think he'd even say the same. Would he have critiques on hyper-fixation for nonviolent strategies? Would he have critiques about pacifism? Probably, yeah. And they'd probably be pretty damn good ones. And specific.

Unlike this, which is just arguing against generic white supremacist society (which we should do) and doing very little work to actually talk about pacifism in particular.

Worse still, they encouraged the state repression and claimed that the revolutionaries deserved it by engaging in militant resistance. (Nowadays, they are claiming that the liberationists’ ultimate defeat, which pacifists facilitated, is proof of the ineffectiveness of liberationists’ tactics.)

THIS IS NOT ONLY A PROBLEM OF PACIFISTS. Good grief, this should just be “LibDem Bullshit Protects the State” at this rate.

Revered pacifist David Dellinger admits that “one of the factors that induces serious revolutionaries and discouraged ghetto-dwellers to conclude that nonviolence is incapable of being developed into a method adequate to their needs is this very tendency of pacifists to line up, in moments of conflict, with the status quo.” David Gilbert concludes that “failure to develop solidarity with the Black and other liberation struggles within the US (Native American, Chicano/Mexican, Puerto Rican) is one of the several factors that caused our movement to fall apart in the mid-70s.” Mumia Abu-Jamal questions, were white radicals “really ready to embark on a revolution, one that did not prize whiteness?”

I feel like I need to play a Sesame Street game of “one of these things isn't like the others, one of these things isn't the same.” Mumia's literally talking about all white radicals, while Gilbert and Dellinger are engaging in self-critique on pacifism and nonviolent resistance. Though interconnnected, Peter isn't making that point clear or at all relevant.

Like I said, LibDem Bullshit Protects the State but make it edgy.

And even then, the practice of nonviolence is often subsidized by whites in power, used by white dissidents or government officials to manipulate the movement for their comfort, and usually abandoned by large portions of the grassroots in favor of more militant tactics.

The government, famous pacifists. How many times do I need to say that this is less about pacifism and the hyper-fixation on nonviolence as a strategy than it is about typical liberal democracy and white supremacist rubbish. I would've preferred the discussion about pacifism being racist, but it keeps getting sidelined for generic things that don't talk about pacifism in the first place and also Peter's inability to understand that “nonviolent strategy” or what constitutes “nonviolence” doesn't map neatly onto everything he fucking cites.

At least Ward Churchill knew the assignment, but I have to deduct points because he liked this book (enough to cite it in footnotes). Probably because it was an ego boost to see a Baby Anarchist (at the time) rip off his Marxist diatribe point for point, if I'm honest.

White radicals must educate other white people about why people of color are justified in rebelling violently and why we too should use a diversity of tactics to free ourselves, struggle in solidarity with all who have rejected their place as the lackeys or slaves of the elite, and end these global systems of oppression and exploitation.

Not wrong again, but why did we shift the goal posts from “white pacifists” to “white radicals?” The two aren't the same, even if there may be overlaps.

Overwhelmingly, this chapter is meandering and doesn't do the job it sets out to do. It fails to engage with a whole history of possible nonviolence, it keeps referencing how the world is that influences white pacifists but swapping the position of where much of that propaganda comes from (because while they're not guiltless, they're not the ones in charge of the media, schools, and any other government institutions), and it shifts goal posts because it can't actually do any work.

The footnotes are largely from emails and listserv, and I find that frustating because we can't even backtrack any of it. I can do some research to gleen some information, but it's all lost and Peter doesn't recreate shit. He just writes like he's picking a forum fight, refusing to even provide any amount of details that clarify anything for the reader. This chapter feels superfluous, if I'm honest.

To avoid a lengthy tangent in my upcoming discussion of the stated chapter (above) due to random research regarding yet another choice of footnote, I'm just going... to put it here because it's something I don't really need to address with regards to Peter's writing but is mostly focused on the footnote chosen that I think could've been better by picking a more popular source.

So another footnote refers to this interview with Alex Haley, which I find interesting because we know that Alex Haley often embellished and had a number of scandals (primarily with regards to Roots). Similar questions have been put forward as of at least 2023 regarding the manufacturing of the intensely hostile relationship between MLK and Malcolm X, which is courtesy of research done by Jonathan Eig. Additionally, there are questions surrounding The Autobiography of Malcolm X, too. The part that Peter takes is as follows, which isn't part of the conversation around whether or not Alex Haley changed them (but I'm not sure if Eig ever outlined how much was changed beyond the entry around Malcolm X):

Apart from bigots and backlashers, it seems to be a malady even among those whites who like to regard themselves as “enlightened.” I would especially refer to those who counsel, “Wait!” and to those who say that they sympathize with our goals but cannot condone our methods of direct-action in pursuit of those goals. I wonder at men who dare to feel that they have some paternalistic right to set the timetable for another man’s liberation.

Over the past several years, I must say, I have been gravely disappointed with such white “moderates.” I am often inclined to think that they are more of a stumbling block to the Negro’s progress than the White Citizen’s Counciler [sic] or the Ku Klux Klanner.

There's also this interview with Manning Marable on Democracy Now... which is weird? This whole thing surrounding Alex Haley is weird, and it's hard to dig into it.

I would've just been “lazy” and used MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail because it makes the same point, though it does it with a less punchy structure (ironically). Such as:

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

And:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Considering at least part of this is almost identically phrased, it does make me wonder about Alex Haley's interview.

Not to mention, part of it amusingly contradicts Peter's points on nonviolence (whether he cares or not):

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.

And:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

In these paragraphs, MLK positively discusses nonviolent direct action and how the nonviolent actions create tension. We know this through any movement, through any nonviolent actions. Mumia even wrote a whole lot about this in We Want Freedom because he talked about the nonviolent programs the Black Panthers ran: free breakfasts, clinics, etc.

The fact that Peter doesn't see these as “nonviolent” makes me question his understanding of terminology. The education we receive in a school is inherently violent, especially for the many marginalised people having it coerced on them... but creating a community center with many learning options is not inherently violent. However, it will be treated with hostility by the state.

Does he, then, take the state's word on what is and isn't violent if he doesn't realise that many marginalised communities constantly engage in nonviolent action all the time?

There are a lot of elements that Mumia points to, which usually hint at similar themes, that often go neglected by people utilising his work to say that “nonviolence protects the state” without understanding what topics Mumia is discussing.

While he does, at one point, state:

The Richmond demonstration, the newsletter (soon to be reborn as a full-fledged newspaper), and the armed community police patrols would prove irresistible to ghetto youth who had simmered under the glare of overtly racist cops. They longed to join the swelling Civil Rights movement, but had not because they could not bear to join any group which would meekly submit to racist violence, as demanded by some civil rights organizations. The 1967 revolts marked a rise in Black militancy, a psychic change of pace that the middle-class leaders of the southern-based Civil Rights movement could not address, and word spread about the actions of the Black Panther Party. The Black journalist William Gardner-Smith remarked, “The ’67 revolts marked the entry of the tough ghetto youths into the race battle, and the existing organizations, led by intellectuals or the middle-class, could not cope with them—the Panthers had to be born.”

Emphasis mine. This is not an argument that nonviolence isn't useful, it is an argument that the urging of “tolerating racist violence” in the attempt to achieve rights was not something that appealed to people (and also wasn't working). It's a discussion that focuses on assimilation as a tactic and how assimilation requires people to meekly tolerate bullshit they shouldn't have to (racist violence, in this instance) and that people didn't want to assimilate. They wanted to be themselves and to be safe in that identity.

This doesn't exclude nonviolence as a tactic (which, btw, Mumia repeatedly highlights as being part of the tactics in the BPP—the police patrols, though armed, were trained to engage via nonviolence unless they were unable to avoid it; the difference in this kind of nonviolence and the nonviolence of the middle-class... is what kind of risk it came with).

But Mumia also makes comments like this:

The Sacramento demonstration launched the Party into a national orbit, perhaps long before it was ready. The Party was swarmed with applications from young men and women around the nation who wanted to open branches of the new organization in their local communities.

Again, emphasis mine. He's making it clear that there were other issues at play for how its growth could've potentially been a problem (and it can be—we've seen similar issues in other quick-growing movements that haven't figured out how to deal with that growth; this is also, for the record, part of the problem with the Occupy movement came out of that growth because it required having to deal with people who had wide-ranging views, including wannabe capitalists and right-libertarians, rather than a cohesive understanding around the destructive nature of capitalism... and people didn't deal with that in any meaningful way).

For example:

“A law book, a tape recorder, and a gun” were all that were needed, Huey explained. “It would let those brutalizing racist bastards know that we mean business.”5 In accordance with Huey’s study of the law, BPP patrollers agreed to accept arrests nonviolently—to a limit. Newton and Seale promised to “do battle only at the point when a fool policeman drew his gun unjustly.”

And then Mumia goes on to describe the programs the BPP had instituted and later formalised, like Free Breakfast for Children and the free clinics... Free clothing, etc.

Some different tangents. First:

The Free Breakfast for Children Program was, by far, the most popular of all the Party programs. It also served as a unique opportunity for the secular BPP and the Black church to establish a working relationship since most breakfast programs were situated within neighborhood churches and staffed by Panther men and women. Father Earl Neil, a Black priest assigned to Oakland’s St. Augustine Episcopal Church, was an early and vocal supporter of the Black Panther Party and made some interesting comparisons between the Party and the traditional church.

This is so... frustrating for me? I understand that the church is an important element of many people's communities, but I also feel like the programs (that should inherently be secular) that people need routinely get co-opted by people who have a vested interest in ensuring that people maintain a specific view on the way life is. While it is helpful and often assists people in having access to free/cheap spaces, churches can have ulterior motives for providing that assistance.

It makes me wonder if any of the Panthers had any critiques on the relationship with churches and clergy; I'd be interested to read those.

Then, at a different time, Mumia wrote:

Watts took on a meaning to Black Americans that symbolized a kind of resistance that was anathema to the likes of Dr. King or his co-integrationists of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The Black Panther Party came into existence, not to support or supplement the major civil rights organizations, but to supplant them.

The major civil rights groups were shocked and stymied by the outrage revealed by Watts. Those who would organize the Black Panther Party looked to Watts as inspiration and an ashy harbinger of things to come.

Which is also interesting in the ways in which a lot of the more 'violent' uprisings in response to continued police brutality (Ferguson, for example) were co-opted by more middle-class and intellectual folks and, as a result, silenced to a degree... especially as Mumia looks to them, in the modern day, for hope (as per the new introduction to this edition).

Which isn't a problem alone for race-related organisations; it's a constant and persistent problem that middle-class and intellectuals co-opt movements and silence the more radical aspects of them. It's just sad and frustrating because we could get so much more if only we'd let people (metaphorically or literally, depending on situation) burn it all down and help us find new imaginations for what could be within the ashes.

And also this list is really interesting to revisit:

Among these programs were the Intercommunal News Service (1967); the Petition Drive for Community Control of Cops (1968); Liberation Schools, later called Intercommunal Youth Institutes, (1969); People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinic (1969); Free Clothing Program (1970); Free Busing to Prisons Program (1970); Seniors Against Fearful Environment (SAFE) Program (1971); Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation (1971); and Free Housing Cooperative Program (1971).

In later years, the Party would initiate other programs including Free Shoe Programs, Free Ambulance Services, Free Food Programs, and Home Maintenance Programs.

While clearly every branch of the Party didn’t offer all of these programs, most did operate the basics: a free breakfast program, a clinic, and a free clothing program. The bigger chapters, such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, tended to provide the widest range of community services, while smaller branches tended to concentrate on the most popular programs.

Unrelated to Peter's book, I'm glad I'm reading Mumia; his writing is so beautiful, and it's a bizarre feeling to experience the joy of reading about such troubling material. Truly, I would recommend it.

Last night, I began reading chapter two. This is one of the chapters where Peter pulls from Mumia, beginning with the very first line of the chapter (after the Frederick Douglass quote). He contextualises it as if Mumia is saying that all nonviolence doesn't work and only focused on violent resistance, which isn't really true for what's being said.

The roots of armed resistance run deep in African American history. Only those who ignore this fact see the Black Panther Party as somehow foreign to our common historical inheritance. (p82)

This sentence is being used by Mumia to start a historical discussion about the resistance that has been happening within Black communities in white Euro colonies (specifically white America) for centuries. It says as much, but Peter doesn't use it to mean this despite the fact that that is what Mumia means. Further supporting this understanding is literally the next paragraph:

Many forces converged to bring about the organization bearing the name of the Black Panther Party. One of them, of course, was the powerful psychological and social force of history. In the 60s, many books began to emerge on the theme of Black history. Long-forgotten or little-mentioned figures began to come to life to a generation that, having not grown up in segregated educational environments, was less familiar with the historical currents underlying Black life. (p82)

Emphasis mine.

Mumia continues to do a lot of other contextualising for things that happened in the 1960s. Part of it focuses on MLK Jr, discussing the impact that the Watts Riot in August 1965 had on him (as well as others). I'm just going to quote the whole passage here because it's worth reading on its own, even without critiquing another book in the process:

For the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Watts was a profound eye-opener. The middle-class, somewhat genteel preacher seemed stunned by the sheer scope and rancor revealed by the Watts Rebellion. Watts appeared to mark a major turning point in his vision of what America was and what it could become.2

Post-Watts, Dr. King would speak of the Black ghetto as a “system of internal colonialism.” In one speech before the Chicago Freedom Festival, he would exclaim, “The purpose of the slum is to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness.…” He would further declare, “The slum is little more than a domestic colony which leaves its inhabitants dominated politically, exploited economically, segregated and humiliated at every turn.”

In a word, Watts radicalized King.

If Watts had that effect on a man of decidedly middle-class orientation, what of people who came from, and saw life from, the bottom of the social pecking order? For them, Watts wasn’t a shock or a surprise. It was an affirmation of the same inchoate rage that boiled in their very veins.

That radical, rebellious spirit constituted a powerful social force that would attract tens of thousands of alienated ghetto folks to either join or support the Black Panther Party. Yet that radical spirit did not begin in Watts, but came from much older, much deeper roots. (p83-84)

This whole section—there is more after it that discusses Huey Newton—culminates in a final point that highlights the primary discussion within this historical narrative:

Watts raises the question of the social role of mass violence in the shaping and formation of public policy.

Mumia's very clear about what this chapter will be about and what his framing of it is, which is not to highlight the failures of nonviolence with the successes of violence. Mumia's entire discussion is to look at that history, understand it within its context, understand what happened, and understand how that history influenced movements later on. His point is, in some places, to comment on or explore some of the problems within that history that led to failures; his point is to understand what helped maintain part of those movements.

You can see this in the opening of his discussion about the Christiana Resistance (often referred to as the 'Christiana Riot'), where he says:

With this historical perspective on riots, we will look at an event when Blacks engaged in radical liberational violence, not to hurt whites, but to preserve their own freedom. This event also demonstrates how a term like riot can prove misleading by masking the objectives of acts of mass violence. (p86)

And then he goes on to explain that most riots were actually committed by white people to informally reinforce the social hierarchy (giving examples of newly-white Irish folks attacking Black people to “put them in their place” and to participate in showing their support for the white supremacy that “helped” the Irish).

This paragraph highlights a potential issue:

It is unclear why the Gorsuch posse, consisting of Edward Gorsuch, his son Dickinson, his nephew, his cousin, two neighbors, a newly appointed US deputy marshal, Henry Kline, and two other paid officers, knew to target the Parker home. Perhaps he had intelligence gleaned from the omnipresent snitches in the area that steered him to the dwelling.

(Also, yes. Edward Gorsuch is a brother to one of Neil Gorsuch's direct ancestors. I did look into that.)

It's almost like Mumia is hinting that snitches (and people who make good informants like, oh, racists... and misogynists, but definitely racists in this moment of history) were part of the problem. (Just to note, William Parker—one of the leading members of Christiana's Black self-defense group, along with his wife Eliza—was also forewarned of the Gorsuch posse coming to him. Again, the way Mumia writes about this event is very engaging; I'd recommend reading his words in their entirety.)

Mumia then shifts back to the 1960s:

Beneath the fact of Watts, beyond the existence of the Black Panther Party, was a seething anger, a bubbling cauldron of Black rage, that Martin Luther King’s somewhat sweet, ethereal speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, several years before, could hardly assuage.

More to Black urban appetites was the cutting, insightful, militant speech of Malcolm X, whose critique of theheralded March on Washington was widely read, and heard over Black radio. (p94)

Which leads into a long quote of Malcolm X (which is one that Peter draws from and credits Mumia with, though he doesn't credit Mumia with the above discussion about perspectives of MLK and Malcolm X to urban Black folks. This quote of Malcolm's discusses how the government sought a way to take control of the march on Washington and how they'd supplant the original anger and frustration with the passivity of the chosen nonviolence movement. Part of the Malcolm quote that Mumia uses says:

It was the grass roots out there in the street. It scared the white man to death, scared the white power structure in Washington, D.C. to death; I was there. When they found out this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital, they called in … these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, “Call it off.” Kennedy said, “Look you all are letting this thing go too far.”

And also (again Malcolm):

This is what they did at the march on Washington. They joined it … became part of it, took it over. And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all.…

This isn't so much that nonviolence protects the state but that people who view themselves as being part of or helped by the state are willing to shatter our movements, every last one of them.

None of my commentary on this opening part of the chapter (which I still need to finish at this point) is to say that we should be purely nonviolent or violent, but it is to say that Mumia goes to a lot of effort to contextualise that history... And it's not so some edgy white manarchist can throw the nuance in the trashcan whenever he wants, just to make a point that isn't entirely true or even useful.

Edit: The following bit is almost directly lifted without ever crediting Mumia:

Martin’s “dream” is better known to most Americans, but to Black people, especially those teeming millions barred within US ghettos, Malcolm’s words were closer to the mark, closer to the heart.

And the only reason that Peter's variation on this feels like he lifted it is because it comes immediately after him citing Mumia citing Malcolm X. It's also being used in a way that isn't at all similar to what Mumia is saying, which is that “Black resistance has historical roots and Malcolm X's more incendiary speech resonated more with many Black people than MLK's 'dream'.” (And the implication given is that too much of that 'dream' is that there was a lot of sit-and-wait for someone to give you what you needed, rather than taking under your own power within a movement.)

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

From South End version:

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

To the Active Distro:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is now:

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

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

Footnote 5 is entirely new. It reads:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To this:

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

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

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

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

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

Some changes include changing this sentence:

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

to this:

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

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

Nuclear arms paragraph doesn't really change.

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

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

by adding:

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

between 'influence' and 'popular'.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So much for the victories of pacifism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A controversial but necessary example is that of the Holocaust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANYWAY... That chapter is finished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And related footnotes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And later:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On balance, the independence movement proves to have failed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later on, he says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, Peter then goes on to say this:

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

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

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

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

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