It has implicit and explicit connections to white people’s manipulations of the struggles of people of color. This book will show that nonviolence, in its current manifestations, is based on falsified histories of struggle. On the contrary, there are a great many solid arguments against nonviolence that pacifists have simply failed to answer in their literature. Most proponents of nonviolence with whom I have discussed these issues, and these have been many, approached the conversation like it was a foregone conclusion that the use of violence in social movements was both wrong and self-defeating (at least if it occurred anywhere within 1,000 miles of them). Instead, they tend to be acquainted with the aura of taboo that shrouds militants to have internalized the fear and disdain the corporate media reserve for people willing to actually fight against capitalism and the state and to have confused the isolation imposed on militants with some self-imposed isolation that must be inherent in militancy. This is true even when they already know a great deal about other movement issues.

In my experience, most people who are becoming involved with radical movements have never heard good arguments, or even bad ones, against nonviolence. Within these dynamics caused by the knee-jerk isolation of those who do not conform to nonviolence, there is no possibility for a healthy or critical discourse to evaluate our chosen strategies. Once isolated, militants lose access to resources, and they lose protection from being scapegoated by the media or criminalized by the government. Anti-authoritarians and anti-capitalists who suggest or practice militancy suddenly find themselves abandoned by the same pacifists they’ve just marched with at the latest protest. Nonviolence is maintained as an article of faith, and as a key to full inclusion within the movement. But the facilitator, who was also a conference organizer, and on top of that a panelist, decided against this approach.īecause of the hegemony advocates of nonviolence exert, criticisms of nonviolence are excluded from the major periodicals, alternative media, and other forums accessed by anti-authoritarians. I had hoped that each panelist would be given a substantial amount of time to speak in order to present our ideas in depth and to limit the likely alternative of a back-and-forth volley of clichéd arguments. Predictably, the discussion turned into an unproductive and competitive debate. In August 2004, at the North American Anarchist Convergence in Athens, Ohio, I participated in a panel discussing the topic of nonviolence versus violence.

How nonviolence protects the state