Click here to read my most recent opinion piece, which I co-authored with Ramona E. Dúran for CounterPunch. It is entitled “It’s Time to Get Violence: Breaking Down the Assault on Antifa,” and it is part of our activities for the Radical Education Department (RED).
Excerpt: “Violence is the great obfuscator. When its name is invoked by the powerful, rest assured that it is masking much more than it reveals. While it is presented as an objective description of a state of affairs requiring immediate condemnation, it simultaneously serves to discredit movements and ideas, deny the political agency of certain actors, and cloak brutal forms of domination. Its purportedly objective presentation is, in fact, a legerdemain that stirs up moral sentiments in order to muddy political analysis. Under the guise of indubitable moral rectitude, the world is turned upside: those who stand up for justice are often made to appear as senseless savages, and the greatest perpetrators of violence are exonerated, or even presented as victims.
Of late, violence has made headlines in the U.S. corporate media by serving to discredit the work of anti-fascist activists and distract from the actual threats of fascism and white supremacy […read more].”
Thanks for your excellent article on the violence / nonviolence issue, a badly needed corrective. If you haven’t come across them, you might be interested in the two books by Peter Gelderloos on the same issue:
How Nonviolence Protects the State
The Failure of Nonviolence: From the Arab Spring to Occupy
These are the most thorough demolitions of the ideology of nonviolence that I have yet encountered.