Nonviolence is Violence, Too: Somebody's Gotta Die

[Music] Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode we have back on the show one of my favorite guests, recurring guests on Rev Left, um, two black who is a poet, an organizer, an intellectual, writes essays, um, is on the Black Mids podcast, and recently wrote an essay that is on grassrootsthinking.com and I'm sure some other places as well, entitled Non-violence is Violence 2, Somebody's Got to Die. It's I think a really historically dialectical materialist, the analysis of the seeming binary between violence and non-violence the way that we talk about violence and non-violence and think about those two things are often as two separate spheres, as two holy opposite things that we either pick one or the other to the exclusion of the one that we didn't pick and I think two black complicates that in a really generative and analytical way using a sort of dialectical materialist approach to the seeming binary and I think the discussion we have about this is, um, you know, genuinely deep. I think the stuff that you're going to hear in the next hour or two of this conversation takes a topic that many of you have probably thought about, probably talked about, um, and deepens it and complicates it and adds nuance to it in a way that I think is rare and genuinely unique. So I think this brings a certain depth and clarity to a well-tredded conversation that is that is incredibly worth it, especially at this moment of extreme violence in our society. I talked about this a little bit upfront from the releasing of the Epstein files and the violence of the US and Israeli ruling classes, the genocide and Gaza, the the seeming imminent possible attack on Iran, the violence and murder of ice in the streets of Minneapolis and across the country, the violence of the detention centers, etc. We're living in an incredibly violent fucking system that every single day in order for it to continue on, it costs human life. It's like human life is what we pump into the engine of this system and and the daily grinding violence that is necessitated by its very existence and continuation needs to be seen and looked at very, very clearly. Um, and only then can we begin to actually talk about the possibilities of revolutionary violence or non-violent strategies against the system. So whatever you think on that topic, this conversation will add a new wrinkles to it that almost certainly you haven't considered in the same way that I hadn't considered a lot of the stuff that we do get into. So without further ado, here is my conversation with two black on his latest essay, Non-violence is Violence 2. Somebody's got to die. Yeah, I'm two black, um, poet, author, um, organizer, host of the Black Miss podcast. This recently wrote essay. This is part one of two parts actually, um, the essay being called Non-violence is Violence 2. Yeah, it's a really interesting essay. I think it grapples with not only question of violence and non-violence and the sort of the dialectic between them, but a lot of the major figures that those of us on, you know, the Marxist left in particular will be familiar with and the different sort of strategies employed by them in the face of the overwhelming violence of the capitalist imperialist state. This is also, I think, an interesting moment to have a discussion like this for so many reasons. We've seen the ice protests and the resistance to it. We've seen the state murder people in the streets and have no accountability. We see what they're doing in West Asia, funding and arming the genocide in Gaza, making moves now on Iran, just an incredibly violent system. And we're speaking about two days out from the most recent release of a tranche of Epstein files showing that the entire, or at least large, large factions of the ruling class in this country and the economic and political spheres have engaged or have been adjacent to the engagement of human sex trafficking, pedophilia, and just acts of unspeakable violence against the most powerless people on the planet. So, you know, it's sort of a macabre, but important moment, I think, to discuss this issue in particular. The essay itself, of course, is titled, as you said, non-violence is violence too. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. So I guess to start off, obviously a lot of people won't have read the essay before listening to this podcast, although I'll link to it in the show notes. People should read it and grapple with it in detail. But can you introduce us to this essay, some of the historical figures that you are wrestling with and what you mean by the claim that non-violence is violence too? Yeah, they just need to write those events up because this was actually conceived a month ago. I just knew it was going to take some time to write it. The goal was actually having it out by MLK Day, but there was still some edits that needed to be done. So it ends up dropping the same day that the last name is slipping either nurse that was killed and many app was, it ends up dropping the same day that that occurred. And it was no intent to time that, obviously, no one knew exactly when that was coming, even though as we'll get to the violence, it's inevitable in these situations. So the time it was kind of eerie because I'm not one of those people that likes to write stuff, to exploit tragedies, so scholars do, that's never been my thing. So it was kind of, it was kind of took me back for it, it's like an honest thing when I actually hit me that it dropped the same day, but at the same time, taking myself out of it, I think it was relevant to kind of grapple with what occurred. In terms of what I mean by non-violence violence, to I mean, there's a lot of different ways we can go here. Some of this, some of what I'll say is and yes, some of it's not, but I guess for me, particularly since I'm on this podcast, it comes down to this question of idealism versus materialism per usual. So this is a materialist analysis of so-called non-violence, and when I feel like when you look at it materially, it does it, it doesn't really hold up that there's somehow non-violence involved because it requires violence to be successful. From the idealist perspective, if you are thinking about the intention of someone who goes into a protest and decides not to carry a gun or not to shoot a gun or not to cause any physical harm to their opponent, then from that perspective, I guess you can say, it's non-violent, but as we'll get to later in the discussion, often what requires violence to, or non-violence to work is the opponent has to be violent. Non-violence that is best is about confronting power, and in this case, we talk about capitalism, right? So capitalism is inherently violent, imperialism is hardly violent, and when you confront these things about, when you confront them about their violence, they will react violently, and that is often what brings people to your side, right? That is often what galvanizes more people. So you mentioned Minneapolis, unfortunately, the murder of two people within what a week and a half or two weeks. There was others murdered as well, but the high profile murders of particularly two white folks brought more attention to what's happening in Minneapolis and has brought more people into the streets. And now there are real considerations for general strikes, and more people are getting involved in organizing, and even even the Trump administration for a moment there had to retreat a bit in their strategy in Minneapolis. They had to fire one of the people who was over it at the time and bring in a new guy and say they're going to do targeted operations. Most of this is PR, it's not that they're really retreating materially, but they have to push out the idea that we kind of messed up here because they said that this man was wielding a weapon and he came to kill officers and they all of us watched the video, we could see that's not what happened. So nonviolence is people think of it as this effect of bringing all more people, but it requires someone to, as I say, say die or to be harmed or to be hurt. And if ice was peaceful from a, again, this is, we're talking about how this looks, not more so how it actually functions, but if ice was not putting on, you know, these grand stages of rating home depots and was just doing what they did under Biden and Obama, there wouldn't be anybody in the streets. So this creates a bit of a contradiction that if it's nonviolence, why does it seem that violence is the thing that brings more people to the cause? And if that's the case, then materially, for me, I don't think that could be, I don't think that could be nonviolence. So when I talking about the, you know, idealism versus materialism, it's like, you know, I think, I think Ingalls is said something to the effect of people take the, the concept somehow starts to paint the object instead of the object, painting the concept, you know, I'm paraphrasing it. So nonviolence becomes a thing where the idea of it that someone is behaving peacefully and someone is not hurting somebody. The idea of that, I think, moves people that you are somehow standing above the, the gunk as I get into a bit in my second essay. But when we actually look at what occurs, you know, it's it's not just the individual's intentions, it's the fact that you have to provoke the worst of your enemy to bring about, you know, the most, the most change usually. And the less you're able to do that, the less people are really really interested in getting involved because they don't really deem it necessary, particularly in the United States where people have been so desensitized to violence. You have to really ratchet it up for people to be involved. We've been here in the word fascism for years and you know, I've debated whether I think that's the way people frame it at least has always been, has always been helpful. But nonetheless, like words have been thrown around for years and people didn't really take it seriously. But then when something like this happens in the streets that all of a sudden, you know, even in Atlantic, it's like, well, actually this might be fascism now, right? Like this is it. But now again, there's a lot of contradictions even in that because we could talk about, you know, Maduro being kidnapped, we could talk about what's happening, like you said, in Israel, we could talk about all those different things and how that violence does is somehow seem to shock people in the same way sometimes. Nonetheless, what it shows in this case that nonviolence is it requires, as I was looking at, we can get into more details later, but it requires some kind of violent reaction to really be particularly to be successful, particularly nonviolent action, particularly like civil disobedience. Now, if we're talking about a visual or just writing a letter or putting out a statement or some of those things that Jean Sharp talks about in his books, I think he has like 178 different types of nonviolence, like individual forms of him may not always lead to that. But anything that is actually confronting power and forcing power to have to make a move, you almost need power to react in his worst forms to demonstrate why other people need to be involved and why it needs to be defeated. Yeah, and we're going to get into more of the details. I think what comes out already, and if you read the essay, it comes out even more is like, and you've kind of made this explicit that there is this dialectical materialist analysis of violence and nonviolence that is much deeper and more analytical than the conversations and discourse that usually surrounds the topic, which as you say are as often idealist, right? Like two totally separate categories of behavior juxtaposed to one another as always in opposition to one another and you get a pick which one you do or don't agree with. Right. And that's the sort of childish way, I think, of looking at the topic and you complicated in all the right ways. Before we get into this, go ahead. Yeah, I was going to say it was quickly. Yeah, and it's like that was part of the argument is, I think we need to move on from that binary of nonviolence versus violence because as I said, essay, I think is actually a material. You are in a violent situation nonetheless. And the only question is really how do you choose to confront it? Right. But you are in that situation nonetheless. If if if I go up to a cop, you know, and stand in front of a cop and and and don't put in the hands on the cop, the cop is still Saturday with a gun. Even the cop doesn't pull the gun, they're still Saturday with a gun. I'm in a violent situation. Like I'm not I'm not avoided that at any point. Now, maybe I don't, you know, respond in the same exact way. And that's an individual choice. But the actual material interaction is still violence. And it can get very violent, even if I don't pull any kind of like deadly weapon, right? And it's somehow like you said, we the idealist part of it doesn't deal with the actual circumstance as a whole. It reduces it to the individual and their ability to make a choice how they want to move. And it's not to take away from people's personal like morals or their autonomy. I think that's important. But I just don't think that the whole situation can be understood as non violent. I don't I just don't think that actually that actually explains anything. Yeah, absolutely. Before we get into this next question about sacrificial violence, which I think is an interesting concept and core to the argument, I'm just kind of curious like outside the outline itself. Like what was there anything in particular that prompted you to think and write on this topic? Or was it something that's just been simmering in your mind for years? Or what prompted you to write about this? Yeah, I was, you know, I do work with political prisoners and I was talking to one of my comrades who works on the campaign for the Piddles and two, which I've talked about in this podcast. It's two political prisoners. I'm here in Indiana when I'm from Nightingtron and John Cole, John Balibon Cole, who received over 200 flesh years combined for intervening to save a prisoner or fellow prisoner in 1985 at Piddles and Prison, who was being beaten by guards. We later find out we're in a clan. They actually did not, they did kill anyone in that situation. They simply intervened just to defend him nonetheless that turned into them getting to wonder plus years. So I've been involved in that campaign for a while. I was talking to somebody, you know, involved in that campaign and we were actually talking about Palestine, but we're just talking about this, this kind of like missing point that we see when people want to talk about like innocence or things of that nature in relation to Palestine and how with the, you know, people who want to condemn Hamas, so they want to condemn resistance and then they're saved, but the genocide must stop. And even without getting into the condemn Hamas conversation so much, it's just, I think if you zoom out a little bit what people are saying is almost as if there is not some kind of force that needs to be applied very materially, like it's almost as if that doesn't happen. It's just like we all get to just say this is bad, but we don't have to really acknowledge what it will take to end it. Like that part never really gets addressed so everybody gets to be on the right moral side, but we don't have to acknowledge that there is a force that needs to take place. So we were talking about that and then it just led to a big eye that said in the conversation and he had said it as well, even when you look at non-violent, so-called non-violent movements, they have to confront these things and usually it still requires a form of violence to get to move things along or to really bring attention to the situation even if they're not fully successful with ending whatever they're fighting against. So as we were saying, like in any case, there has to be a confrontation with violence, but it's also the fact that there has to be some kind of force involved, even for the people who like to claim the peaceful side or something of that nature, right? Like it requires it nonetheless. So it made me think about just from there I just wanted to write something on it because I've noticed it for years, as always kind of struck me as are that when I look at the history books, whether it's in the civil rights movement, whether it's in India or the SSA, particularly the second one's going to deal a bit with Ghana and positive action, there's it's never this clean, everybody just walks the street to this nice and then they got what they wanted. Like people had to die, people had to be slaughtered, people had to be harmed and hurt. And that part is always just saying is this kind of utility to uplift non-violence, but I'm like if there was bloodshed, then again, it just seemed like if there's a contradiction here, they were not really addressed to. And for folks who were new to it, it's almost like we're not being honest with them and really telling them what they're getting involved with. And he go a little bit like the civil rights movement, they were very clear on what they were entering into. Like there was anybody that, you know, these are people who were trained, if they were going to do a bus, a bus boy car, if they were going to do a, go to a segregated lunch counter, if they were going to ride on a, do a freedom ride, like these are people who were trained and prepared for the violence of the south for the violence of the clan. Like they knew who it was coming and then in freedom, right people, we've had to write wheels. James Bebel will have people write wheels before they got on the bus that he had to turn into their family if something happened because he said, I'm not going to let you get on the bus if I can't explain to your people why you died. You have to have a good reason. So they were very clear on this, but I think non-violence somehow hides that part of it and it's as if you get to stand above the violence and it's like no, you're actually entering into it. You're not standing above it. You're, you're here with it like everyone else, no matter how they choose to confront it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And that leads in and you've already kind of started addressing this idea, but you proposed explicitly in the essay of renaming non-violence as sacrificial violence. And again, you just kind of touched on that, but what exactly qualifies a tactic or a campaign as sacrificial violence? And what does that term let us see that, as you say, non-violence, the term non-violence obscures? We can walk it back a little bit in the essay we talk about philosophy or non-violence as a philosophy versus non-violence as a tactic. This is something that has been, I think, used somehow to sometimes explain the differences of how people approach it. So non-violence as a philosophy, you know, it comes out of the more, like God in the interdition or and then Dr. King and and lost in and many others, whether it's the right movement, I picked that up and you know, that is more so the idea that living one's life now violently overall, there's a certain philosophy that and how you approach that you try to avoid violence in all in all in all manners, at least, the right way to do that is to show that you can suffer and show your opponent that their ways are wrong. So if someone was to hit you, you can somehow demonstrate to them by not responding, you can actually show them that they're wrong and that they can change their ways. It's a form of redemption, right? That's the philosophy. So you believe overall that people can be changed by your non-response to violence or by you being even kind and response to you loving your enemy and turning the other cheek. That's the philosophical concept of it. Technically, it's different. You may not necessarily believe that people's hearts can be changed more broadly, but you understand, as we've already been talking about that, by one, you may not have a military, you may not have the arms or ability to fight on that front anyway. It's kind of a form of guerrilla warfare, honestly, but you say, okay, we can't fight in that way, but what we can do is not following any of these walls. We can simply not go to work or we can simply not buy any of these things, or we can simply not attend any of these things that may be long to the enemy. And then when the enemy hits us, we can decide not to hit back because again, we know that that will bring attention and that will heighten the contradiction of what we're up against that can hopefully bring more people to our side. You're not necessarily interested really in changing the heart of the enemy as much as you're trying to change the heart of others watching your enemy and seeing you can get them involved. And that's something that different nonviolent movements have applied. So those are the differences. And then Kwame Turei, also known, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael, the lay Kwame Turei talked about, it's probably people have seen this quote going around on the internet that in order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. Go back and watch the fool. I've never been able to actually find the fool speech, but the fool clip of that speech, he talks about Dr. King more so applying it philosophically and feeling like you can suffer and you can take pain and harm and your opponent will be changed by witnessing what they're doing to you. Like they will stop and see the wrong of their ways. And then he says, he only made one fallacious assumption is that in order for that to work your opponent must have a heart in the United States or have a conscience in the United States has not, which I don't disagree with that. But what I was trying to advance in the essay, not necessarily disagreeing with him is that again, if you break it down between philosophy and tactic, the opponent doesn't necessarily need to have a heart if you and I are involved in the struggle and we're trying to get other people involved to fight the opponent. We don't care if the opponent has a heart. We actually prefer to my point earlier about the meat vinyl. We prefer they don't have a heart because the less of a heart they have, the more likely we might be to even move people to our side. But what what unites both the philosophy and the tactic is the opponent must be violent, right? That's what unites them at the end of the day is that even whether it's a philosophy or tactic to really change the opponent or to even change the circumstance, even your goals not change the opponent, the opponent has to be violent for any kind of transformation to occur, which again demonstrates that violence is part of it. The opponent has to overreact or do something that force that heightens the contradiction. And that's normally not going to be them being nice back to you, right? That's just not the way it works. So, you know, Dr. King and others, Gandhi, if you read some of their statements, they're very open about this being a kind of a sacrificial sacrificial thing. Like, Gandhi said, we are entering upon a life and death struggle, a holy war. We are performing an arm-bracing sacrifice in which we wish to offer ourselves as obelation. Dr. King said, the way of nonviolence means a willingness to suffer and sacrifice. And he talks about offering them. These are different quotes and different moments offering the body as a weapon. And, you know, James Lawson said something to the effect that, you know, we wanted to end the cycle of violence. So, we say we will take violence upon ourselves to end it. So, so for all of them, as a James Lawson, for those who don't know us, was also a god in the student. He was studied in India and he eventually leads. He trains what was called the Nashville's student movement where all the sit-ins against like lunch counters and stuff happened. And he was the one who trained a lot of the folks that were involved in that. It was also just broadly involved in the movement. So, these are the practitioners of nonviolence and they all speak to this kind of sacrifice. And seem to have a certain clarity about violence that today we don't really get when people talk about nonviolence. So, for me, it was like, well, looking at them materially, you're actually sacrificing your body and sacrificing yourself knowing that there will be a reaction, sacrificing yourself to bring about that violence to achieve some set of specific goals. So, in a piece that said, we can understand the sacrifice of violence as an act or one, for midst of violence of their opponent, and then willfully consumes it as a sacrifice for a specific set of objectives. So, you are consuming this violence knowing that it's coming, knowing that this is going to happen. So, for me, that's more sacrificial. And that was really me trying to, I don't think is the perfect term. I don't particularly care if people take it up or not. It's more so trying to respect what I read nonviolence to be at its best. Like, this is not a piece to bash it or to say, just run out with guns. It's not what I was going for here. So, I didn't want to call like suicidal violence or recklessness or because I don't think that's what it is. It is saying, you know, it's kind of trying to combine the idealists with the materialists, trying to like, it is saying, I'm willing to sacrifice myself for greater cause, but I do need violence to do it. Even if that's not how they fully explicitly said it, that's really what happens. So, it's like it's a sacrificial form of violence because I'm taking the violence on myself. And then you hoping that the violence that occurs upon me can bring more people in and can hopefully in the injustice that I'm fighting. That's more how I understand, as opposed to nonviolence because again, that doesn't actually seem really happening. So, I hope that gives some clarity. Yeah, absolutely. And I do want to reiterate that point you made at the end, is like this is not like some sort of intellectualized screed against nonviolence. You're taking the arguments incredibly seriously. You're seeing the strategic sort of approach and orientation of it. You're giving like full credence to the advocates of such a strategy, especially in the case of the civil rights movement that they knew exactly what they were doing. And this is not something that they're naively going into like wide-eyed and bushy-tailed. They knew what it entailed. And so, I really respect that part of the analysis as well. And I just kind of want to make explicit really quick before we move on. The causal chain of sacrificial violence more or less as you lay out in the text. So, I'll just read it so that the listener kind of understands what's going on. And you can correct me if I get anything wrong here. But step one in this causal chain is the confrontation, right? We'll talk about this in a second. But the movement in one way or another pokes the bear, i.e. sort of threatens power in some way. The second step is provocation that the opponent reacts with lethal repression, which we'll talk about more here in a second. The third step is sacrifice. The practitioner consumes the violence, as you said, without retaliating violently. For amplification, the dramatization of evil goes viral. And we'll talk about an example of that later in this conversation. And then ideally, number five would be the concession at the state public is forced to act out of necessity, not out of conscience, right? Never in American history. And for example, or we could extrapolate this to other contexts is that when the state is acting, it's not out of like some come to Jesus moment where they the light dawns on them and the power of the moral argument convinces them. It is always necessity. I even talk about like the new deal, right? It was not some like FDR didn't come to power with all these wonderful ideas about helping the regular person. It was a concession made by the US state in a specific context where not only did you have an external alternative like the Soviet Union in play, but also within the US itself, you had a robust and increasingly militant communist movement that arising and flourishing in the context and wake of the Great Depression. That was a real threat to power. And so the concessions of the new deal was the system itself kind of being backed in a corner, having an external alternative on display for the whole world to see and an internal move mass movement gaining lots of credence and power and mass support. And so the new deal was not FDR coming to some sort of moral realization. It was the system as a whole reacting out of necessity precisely to save the system. I think I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but FDR said, I've heard this said, you know, you can look this up. I don't, again, I don't know if it's apocryphal, but that his greatest achievement was saving capitalism that the new deal was meant to save capitalism in the face of a genuine communist challenge. And so is that causal chain correct? And do you more or less agree with with how I laid it out? Yeah, I actually appreciate that because I didn't, I never thought about it honestly in a sense of since I was writing about it more philosophically, I guess I didn't think about it in the sense of steps. So if you got that synced to me after the interview, for sure, for sure, you wrote that down. But uh, but yeah, I think, but yeah, I think that that is a good characterization of it in terms of there is a when it's we think about how it plays out. Yeah, that's how it has to go in some way, shape, perform. And obviously it varies depending on the the literal circumstance that one thing happens versus another. But yeah, you you have to exit as a cause of chain. You have to create a reaction. There's a cause and effect that's happening here. And if there's if that doesn't occur, you know, these things are often stifled or they're not really able to grow because you're trying to, you know, you can't you cannot force that concession because power feels as if it doesn't really there's no real threat here, right? So you have to create some kind of crises, some kind of threat for for for for it to occur. I think some of the downsides of that, um, is you go through all it is and at best, you might get a concession, you know, at best, you might you may end the concession, may not always be strong enough or as we know, would like the new deal, or as I talked about with even with laundering, there's a there's a way that as history moves on, we almost forget that that's like the way you laid out the new deal. We forget that that's what occurred. And we do think that after you are came in with great ideas and that's what happened. We do think that the new deal is the best thing ever, you know, as opposed to like you say, it's just a concession. Because the downside here is your nonviolence often is not, um, it's it has some trebles when it's time to actually take power. It's good at tightening contradictions. It's not necessarily always the best at governing once those contradictions are heightened, you know, like that's that's some of the problems it runs into. And even once it does govern, as well, maybe we get to more a bit later, it's not going to be able to govern in the same way that it rose to power. So it's not going to be able to govern in this kind of so-called nonviolent way anyway. Because that's not how you defend your revolution, right? Or that's not you defend your movement. But yeah, I definitely think that that's a good characterization. So I don't even really feel like I need to add much more. Yeah. And and and quickly, you know, once the internal threat sort of subsided had been co-opted, the concession had been made, the fire was tamped down a little bit internally. We got what we now refer to retroactively as the rise of neoliberalism, but in so many ways it was a conscious dismantling of the new deal by the rule in class. So the moment they could, they took all that shit back proving that it was always just a concession and that they were forced into it. And then the moment they weren't forced into it anymore or didn't have to maintain it, they dismantled it. So yeah, and that's the challenge, right? Is how do you keep how do you help people remember? Because I haven't even seen that even now with like looking back at 2020 as I've talked about on here. When I was on here last time, we talked about the and how now people are defending things that were actually meant to pacify them because those things were being taken away. So it's also another causal chain, you know, to think about in terms of you do all this, they send you something to pacify you. And then and then you somehow forget and now you're defending the thing, now you're defending the pacification, right? Like that's that's an odd circumstance that you find particularly in America happens pretty often. I think I as I described in the last essay, it was Bullegg rehab, right? It was it was a drug dealer who starts a rehab center. And then another drug dealer comes in to take the rehab center and you start organizing it to keep the rehab center that's funded by a drug dealer, right? Exactly. It doesn't it doesn't actually make any sense, but that's that's often what we get into. And I think, you know, coming back into the beginning, I think some of that is the idealism of of the United States and terms of it's it's the way we remember history. We don't remember it materially. Remember we remember it as heroes and villains and, you know, comic book story kind of things, right? So we don't remember the actual events that got us to something. We just kind of maybe remember the end result of it. Or we don't even know in some cases, even it's not even know what's about remembering. We don't know the events that got us to something. So that's my worry in this moment in terms of Minneapolis and elsewhere, honestly, is people forget 2020 already and we're just six years, not even really six years removed from George Floyd and people forget that and now because ice is so bad, people are love the cops again because they're local. You know, it's like, and I think it's very strange that that's happening in the city with that almost a ball is police, right? So there is this tendency, I think nonviolence unfortunately does contribute to that because it doesn't because it's always dealing with it's trying to get you to look at higher or higher ideals and higher like forms of morality, which are important, but because it tries to stand above, I think too much in its rhetoric, not in so much in its actions within its rhetoric, it tries to stand above the freight and sometimes I think that gets people to the point where they don't actually look at what's materially occurring. They think about all these ideals that they could just impose on the world and we don't learn anything with that. Yeah. Absolutely. And just on a zoomed out level, like liberalism is idealist and if liberalism is the dominant ideological hegemon, the narratives that will be produced by liberalism will be idealist and that's true in the civil war, it's true in the revolutionary war, it's true about the new deal, et cetera. And that is also why materialism is a threat to liberalism and the liberal ideological hegemony is precisely because it digs deeper and reveals what liberalism obscures. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. But let's move forward and I'll ask a two-part question here so you can take it in any direction you want. I'm interested to hear about and I don't know if I'm pronouncing this correctly, Chenoweth's findings that regimes responded with lethal repression and 88% of nonviolent revolutions from 1900 to 2019. So I'm wondering if you could talk about that statistic and then I would like for you to kind of flesh out the honey and the bear sort of metaphor that you use that I think is powerful as well. Yeah. So I don't know if I say her name correctly either. I'm bad with names, but yeah, Chenoweth I believe is how you say it. But the statistic comes out of the book, Civil Resistance and Wait, that's the chapter name. Yeah. Civil Resistance, what everyone needs to know. Yeah. That's the name of the book. So Resistance, what everyone needs to come out in 2021. They actually have some pretty interesting research. If you just want to look at the research itself and they look at Reviled it in nonviolent revolutions from 1900 to 2019. I think originally they had one. I think it started and maybe they had one that went up to 2006 and then since then they've just continued to grow the information. I don't have all the metrics down on top of my head in terms of how they measured that. But I know in that specific instance, you know, she was able to track these different movements and show that even when they were nonviolent, there was some kind of violent response. Not to be fair, she does demonstrate that movements that are explicitly like violent, armed struggle tend to have more casualties than movements that are nonviolent. But that's still not a case for nonviolence. It just means that maybe more escalated for violence will bring about more repression. But for me, that statistic stood out because it shows as I open the piece with that, you know, that his reticle is that violence is an inevitable consequence of nonviolent action. So if 88% of the time and so-called nonviolent revolutions, some kind of repression occurred and violence is almost always a response to it. So it's just something you should be expecting at this point. She even says, I think later in that piece or later in that book that nonviolent movements have experienced some, I think 23% of the time have experienced mass killings, which is a thousand deaths or more. So not just a few protestors here and there, but you're talking about like over a thousand people in board that are that have killed. That was between 1955 and in 2013, nearly one in four nonviolent revolutions and overturning regime endured mass killings at some point. That's a direct quote from the book. So about so nearly nearly 25% to 23%. So this was something that for me, I was just trying to look for something that could verify the observation that I was making, maybe more anecdotally. And I didn't want to and I was saying, okay, is there anything that can verify this beyond just a few case studies? And I felt like that statistic verified that it is an inevitable consequence and often even welcomed like Gandhi, for instance, during the salt march. The salt march was, there was various campaigns that happened under the Indian Independence Movement, which is also as a lot of contradictions in terms of so-called violence and violence. But during the salt march where, you know, they were, it was the whole thing about British salt and not buying it because they was imposed on the Indians. So there was a big march against that and trying to get people in mass to oppose it and to really oppose all British customs. But it was a 24-day march. But during that march, he literally told his, his protesters or his marches to not even block themselves when they were beaten by the British. So, you know, at least in civil rights movement, they were taught to like cover their heads. He was like, don't even do that. So that's one thing, but it's actually welcomed in some cases. Because you're trying to, you're trying to really exaggerate the point, right? So for me, I just seem to be a statistic that without, since I was writing an essay and not a book, I don't have time to go through every revolution or every movement. So that's a statistic for me. I think just summarized the point that the cause and effect, the cause or chain that we've been talking about. Yeah. I have a thought, as you were speaking, and you were talking about those statistics, you made it clear that in non-violent movements, there's an overall, there is an objectively lower body count, right? Even when the non-violence is met with violence, the overall amount of casualties is significantly lower than when violence is met with violence, which we would expect. But I have an interesting thought here, which is that if you're doing a non-violent movement and you're met with violence, there's less overall casualties. But I would argue that it makes logical sense that maybe 90 to 100% of those casualties are taken and absorbed by the non-violent movement. So there's lower amount of harm overall, but almost all the harm is on the side of the non-violent movement. Now, if you meet violence with violence, there's a higher number of casualties, an increase in overall harm, but perhaps, and I think this makes logical sense, the casualties are on both sides, right? When you think about John, this is just one example. We'll talk about Palestine in a second, which I think is another example, horrifyingly so, but in John Brown's movement, right? If John Brown and his comrades were doing non-violent methods against a rabid slave state and all the fascist and slavers that supported it, like bleeding Kansas, like if if John Brown's side of that was non-violent, there might have been less casualties overall, but it would have been on the side of John Brown and his comrades who would have taken the brunt of that violence. John Brown and his comrades went out, killed people, overall the body count goes out, goes way up. And ultimately, of course, John Brown himself is hung and many of his comrades killed, but they took out several, I mean, a lot of slavers and what we would call fascists today, defenders of slavery and those that were attempting to flood into Kansas to make it a slave state. So that's just a calculus that seems objectively true and what you think about that, you can make up your own mind as to what you think is more worthwhile, but there is something to be said, meeting violence with the violence means that their side suffers too. Yeah, I don't take that statistic as an endorsement, really, of one side or the other, or so just like to your point, it's just thinking about how the puzzle pieces might fit together differently, right? But that's why I ground the piece and this is ultimately a matter of confrontation. That's why I don't think the debate of violence and non-violence is that deep or really even useful because ultimately it comes down to you're going to have to confront this and we'll get to that in the next question, but you're going to have to confront this thing, right? So so on a non-violent point, if you are or as I call a sacrificial by the point, you can weigh the you know, the do we want to do we really want to take the cost of losing that many people? And do we want if you're thinking about it philosophically, or spiritually, do we want to bear the brunt of taking that many lives? Like these are questions that you can genuinely wrestle with. If you are not of that persuasion and you're like, this is what we got to do, we got to pick up arms, you still wrestle with those same questions. Like that's what that's what that's nothing that annoys me about non-violence sometimes is they act like they're the ones that care about life or something. I'm like I don't I don't I mean again, I've tried to be respectful and not take shots at it, but we read some of the literature that was one of the things that stood out was this sense that people that pick up arms don't consider the the toll of their fight, right? Like they're just willing to just go and bloodshed and and and but because we're not willing to shoot or punch anybody, we don't we don't take on the weight of or we we care about the weight of other lives being passed and it's like that's not anyone that's approached this from any sense of actually caring about the people they're fighting for always take on that cost they're always considering it, right? Like that's not something that's lost on them, but there's a way that the violence is made to be bloodthirsty in almost mindless and non-violence is made to be this caring thing and I think that's that just just like just like the people who are proponents of non-violence don't like to be called weak or soft or you know or or immature or whatever all the different all the different ways that they're casted you know and negatively negatively I don't they don't they don't they don't like those terms well I don't think violence should be casted in that way necessarily either like people who are more I just just explicitly violent I don't think should be casted that way every anyone who's fighting a power and trying to overcome that that takes that seriously and is not just looking to to duplicate the thing they're fighting anyone that does that is always considering the amount of lives that they have to be shed or something but they're making a calculation and just like non-violent folks make a calculation that is worth getting beat up to achieve their goal they're making a calculation that it's worth losing certain lives achieved that goal right like these are questions that everyone wrestles with neither side has some kind of more high ground over the other yeah absolutely um okay so you know we can touch on this question as well because early on you say that confrontation with power makes bloodshed imminent and you raise up this metaphor of poking a bear over honey can you talk about that metaphor and what makes violence so structurally likely in your view through that metaphor yeah the the quote was if one confronts a bear over who controls the honey the bear will kill to control it the raging bear does not care if the struggle is armed or non violent it's a simple equation once the bear is poked blood shed is imminent in the end somebody's got to die for the honey so let's just to say that um if you if I want to rob your home and for whatever reason I decided to come in there without any weapons I thought I could just do it while you're asleep or something you will still shoot me if you have a gun if I'm in your home because you try to protect your favor if I go into your home and I show up with a gun you will still try to protect yourself because I'm in your home right like you're not gonna let me take anything you know like you're gonna try to protect yourself especially if you have some kind of weapon on you so we're talking about a bear um not just a regular person by a bear who can who has a lot of power physically um if you try to mess with a bear's honey they're not gonna just you know it doesn't matter how you try to steal their honey they're gonna respond you know violently um so these debates that we have about armed or non armed struggle or whatever are not relevant to the bear it's just a question of how they get there how they maintain their honey so we're talking about capital and you ultimately want to challenge anything related to capital there and you know they'll deal with you differently only as much as it advances their goals but they're not really they don't really care about that much if at the end of the day you're trying to take something that is important to their entire world and that's capital right that's that's that's control over the means of production that's all those things if you want to confront that in any form even if you're doing it to just say we want equal rights in the south but we know that wasn't just about hate and in a bunch of red necks that there was there was real money invested in that there was a certain social order that was being disrupted people are not going to respond nicely to that you know when Dr. King takes it a step further and doesn't just confront the south but confronts the US empire he's dead within a year of the speech against Vietnam like that's how they're going to respond this is just again this is proven out by the statistic that we just talked about you know a bear wants to protect this honey the honey is is whatever is important to your enemy the the honey is whatever is the red line for your enemy for your opponent um and then again in the world of capitalism and imperialism you know where it's pretty clear what the red line is for them and when that line is crossed they're going to respond and whatever they have to do to defend it and to maintain that and they're going to put whoever down that they need to do that they need to put down to do it sometimes they'll buy people off yes sometimes it's not always explicit violence but even when they're buying somebody off somebody's usually dying along the side of that that's how they juxtapose it right so that's that's what that's just the ultimate reality of what we're dealing with and I think to cast it any differently is not it's not being honest with people about what they're walking into when they go to the streets to protest or anything of that nature now if you go to protest something that isn't very um importance of capital then you might get a concession that doesn't really require a lot of violence or any at all you know um hence why we can get certain forms of representation and or we can get acknowledgement statements these things don't cost people anything but you know but if it's something that really costs them they're going to respond hostile right they're going to respond in a hostile way and that's something that people need to be prepared for and they don't discriminate against how you confront them yeah you know if you confront them that's all they're really worried about how you confronted them is is the secondary to the fact that you're too they're that you are willing to confront them absolutely yeah and two quick points on that well one quick point is that you know the I think this applies directly to anybody that is a democratic socialist or anything like that which you know I'm not not hating or anything I'm just presenting you with with the contradiction which is that there's an implicit belief on many on behalf of many democratic socialists that and you know they're rising in in the institutions uh you know people that are self-proclaimed democratic socialist rising within the political system which is that if we do it the right way if we do it democratically we follow law we we win elections we rally the people that will eventually be able to do something that threatens the bear's honey without provoking the bear because hey we did it all the right way you can't you can't we didn't do it violently we didn't steal it from you we did it through the democratic mechanisms and the legal order that you yourself laid out and said is legitimate but the truth is and we've seen this time and we saw it in Chile for example which is the moment you get close to the honey no matter if as you said you do it peacefully democratically and legally or you do it any other way if you actually threaten that honey you will be met with overwhelming violence and so there's a certain sort of delusion on behalf of people who think they can do it peacefully that they won't be met with violence and therefore they're not prepared for it and and my only my only thing to to people like that is just to be like you have to be prepared for it in the same way that it that a you know Salvador Yende did everything right did it the right way you even stepped back from the precipice of arming the workers and making this more explicitly violent and you know he was still killed for it and his entire political project was was drowned in blood regardless because he got too close to the honey and it doesn't matter how you do it and the second point that I think is really good about this metaphor the bear is is representative of a system meaning the bear is an animal in this metaphor it has no individual conscience or personal moral deliberation that an individual might have it is a perfect representation of the instincts of a system because the system operates at a higher level than any individual within it and so you know the bear is a sort of animal driven by instinct to protect its honey in the same exact way that the capitalist imperialist system is not an individual morally deliberating but as as instinctual in some ways as an animal itself and so there is no reasoning with a system in the same way that there's a way that you can reason with an individual and there's no reasoning with a bear like you can reason with the person right right yeah there's yeah you said a lot of things there dope I want to touch on like it speaks to kind of even with talking about the strategy and tactic or the philosophy and tactic like you were using dsa as an example but it's kind that's kind of a scaled up version of what what that is right like so there's the going into the streets and you know trying to confront the south or trying to confront the racist police or something but like you said on a scaled up version is it is an entire political party that again this is not to disparage it or whatever it's just dealing with the reality except materially that you are do it if you do things through the correct mechanisms that you just have a great strategy and you just you know show that you're getting to play that you're willing to play ball but you're also going to do it with you know I don't know ethics of something right and you just try to work a little bit for the people that that will inherently somehow like you know prove that this is the way right and that's that's very ideal is it's been tested many times and doesn't seem to work but it's this but in doing that you also will see how people lose the plot a bit so originally you might have entered into as a tactic like we're going to run under the democratic party because that's the easiest way to get on the ballot and yes we know the Democratic Party Stux or something we're going to run on the ballot so we can get our name out there and then we're going to either we're going to take over the party or maybe we even break from the party like this is the kind of stuff you hear but then you get into the party and now you know like we saw under Biden now because a Biden elected some of your people to certain cabinet seats or not as critical of him the progress is the last people actually to come out against like to say Biden needed to step down when he was clearly over you know his age and you know decline because they had really invested a lot in there so now this has become a philosophy now this is a way of life that we have to capitulate because we can get these things that we need done so to speak so there's a way that your tactic and this is true with a lot of things could become a full-out philosophy if you're not careful and now you are totally under that system you're totally you are now you're accountable to the bear you're not even confronting it anymore you're you're simply just trying to trying to say hey we need to share some of your honey right and you and the bear of the bear is fat and happy the bear will share some of his honey for a moment to capitulate to whatever and then eventually the bear is like I ain't got to share nothing and that's Trump or the guy ain't sharing nothing I'm saying that's what he represents not him as an individual but like I don't have to share anything I'm not sharing shit so now you're you're in a position where you have you have no power like you fully because you worked for the bear now you know you don't have a base you don't you because you've denounced all the things that are needed to confront the bear in real life because those things are too far those things are too extreme those things come with too much human costs whatever you fully fall it found yourself totally under you know like sleeping with the bear basically right because you have you've capitulated so much in trying to get this and trying to redistribute the honey without ever taking it you know because you don't want it like the reality of that is something that you're not willing to deal with and if people are just honest like it's scary to mess with a bear like quite literally if we're talking about a bear like you know you know confronting a bear is not a fun project I get it absolutely but so it's okay to be human and acknowledge that like we're not sitting here standing above that either but that's but if we're being honest about how you ultimately share the honey it's called an quote you know if that's resources if that's wealth whatever then you're gonna the bear can't be the the one over the honey anymore and you might have to confront the bear in ways that you know you know necessarily want to do it so that's that's piece to the limitations of it because again like you know people don't it's like the there's a way that particularly in the United States I'll say I don't think this is as true elsewhere where elsewhere I think they're able to hold on to the tactic like even when you're talking about Chile that was probably more just tactical errors and it was a kind of fantastical belief in something yeah you know and that was also 1973 so we've we should have learned a lot but but but I'm saying you know here there's just this way that people start to tell themselves that things aren't really as bad as they once said they were you know there's this there's this kind of slippage that occurs intellectually or you know mentally where people just don't really because and I think some of that's because the violence is often displaced into dark corners it's not so much confronting the everyday you know middle class white person or just middle class person in general it's not it's not necessarily confronting them so there's this way that you can kind of disassociate and it's definitely confronting people across the world in a different way than it does here yeah so there's a way you can just distance yourself from it and be like well it's not really that bad and and I'm good if they throw me a small little you know prickling of honey that's good enough you know absolutely yeah yeah and I would just say you know summed up in one sentence it's like the closer you get to the honey the more you must be prepared for violence and I think that that kind of sums up what we're getting at and again no shade to the DSA I think it's a formation that has to exist I think it's good that there are candidates out there for all my critiques of them and as far to the left of them as I am that they are in the electoral arena on that terrain getting people to think in different ways and I think it makes people more susceptible to moving further left there have been many people that have been brought in to left wing politics through a figure like Bernie Sanders who over the course of a few short years have themselves moved far to the left of Bernie Sanders and now critique him from the Marxist left so I think there's absolutely a role to play and I also want to say that there are plenty of caucuses and comrades within the DSA who nod in agreement at every single syllable that you and I said and see it very clearly so I'm not trying to you know the DSA itself is a sort of ecosystem of different caucuses and thoughts and lines and and so I don't want to like pretend it's a monolith either yeah I agree and again it's more so just speaking to the the strategies as a whole right and how they sometimes do fall victim yeah to the pitfalls that stand in front of them and I think it also goes to this is maybe a little more abstract point but something I talk with sometimes even when I'm talking to black folks there's a but it's not limited to us by any means but just this tendency that want to call out hypocrisy in and of itself and thinking that that will have some inevitable great ending to it so what I mean by that is if you people sometimes are very much bothered by the fact that certain individuals in society can get away with things that others can't and that's from racial class lines gender lines etc people can be very annoyed at that and we'll spend a lot of time on social media or something expounding on how terrible it is that a group of people can get away with something that you can't get away with there are a group of people can can do something that you're not allowed to do or they can engage in a behavior that someone else is punished for and I think it's important to note those those that kind of hypocrisy that is a form of high knee contradictions but there becomes a thing sometimes I think where that becomes a point of itself to just name that to just name how bad something is just name that this is a hypocrisy or that this is unfair that the ruling class could do this and we can a white people could do this so we can't and it's important to like start there but if you get stuck there like you're just kind of in a circular motion at that point you just name a hypocrisy and just and and and because the system is what it is you're going to always have new hypocracies to name and at what point do you figure out how to confront it right like it so there's a way that you know because there's so much commentary nowadays that people are just naming hypocrisy I was joking with somebody the other day called it in this kind of hypotheticalism where you you name something and hope someone else picks up the gun that you won't pick up right you point out a flaw and hope someone else does something about it you just we just bounce around hoping somebody else acts on it because the best we can do is just name something and sometimes it's true that that's all you genuinely have the power to do so I'm talking about those people but I'm talking about the habit of just naming hypocrisy for the sake of it and how that just becomes a kind of dating after a certain point and I just think that that's that's part of the problem when when confrontation is not really the main thing on the table yeah and like and like you know in the mega movement in particular they don't give a fuck like they don't believe in anything like they spent years talking about stop the groomers save the children pizza gate pedestrian Clinton are eating children in the bottom of whatever Alex Jones spent decades talking about a globalist pedophile cabal and then the real thing is actually here and they all just shrugged their shoulders and samsick are hearing about it you know this is like they don't give a fuck like pointing out hypocrisy is just telling other lefties I see it too but the right will just be like it's I don't know if it's cognitive dissidents or it's just the the raw pursuit of power and domination they don't fucking care no it has no impact we've seen all of those things go away it was just propaganda like it was just straight up propaganda free speech is propaganda constitution is propaganda yeah bashing identity politics why that's literally what the y'all are engaged in you know like all the those things were you know propaganda anti-semitism whatever right like all of that propaganda that's not you know and and again propaganda has has its as his utility clearly because a lot of folks were swept up in it and they thought that you know trouble's gonna drain the swamp this time or whatever you know like this it's laughable you know to those of us who know better but you know liberals do the same thing hold their feet to the fire hold the be accountable push them to the left like this stuff's honestly not much better but you know so it's just it's just again I don't want to be cruel I think people really be desperate man so they claim or whatever you throw out of some time because they just be desperate and capitalism does that it makes people desperate but nonetheless these things are not these things are not helping move the move the needle honestly at this point they just not absolutely so getting back to to Palestine you compare that the great march of return and al-Aqsa flood to argue the oppressors aim can be method dependent can you kind of walk us through that and what exactly you mean and what what that reveals about the nature of colonial power strategy the bear more broadly yeah me look at the piece real quick I forgot to pull that quote um this extends beyond just beyond a just metaphor for example in Palestine land is the honey so Zionist kill Palestinians for it they killed them when they peacefully confront them on their feet that would be the great march of return and even more when they forcefully confront them with arms the al-Aqsa flood neither a knife nor a hug makes a difference they want the land right so it's just really following that metaphor with the bear but saying that that it's beyond a just metaphor I was a play on words like a just instead of just say a metaphor um but it's this isn't just like a great idea like now this is how it works like if you know the great march of return you know there have been a block aid on Gaza up to that point I think that was what 2018 is don't quote me on that but after that point was like 11 or 12 year blockade on Gaza since the people were who you know rightfully lived there we're trying to return and and just in one day you know Israel shot 59 people dead right and these are people who by and large were returning without any guns this death definitely was not an October 7th situation or anything people were were just hands up peacefully all the words we hear for returning and they were shot down and it goes just kind of showed the limitations of again the sacrificial violence that that you know certain people particularly Palestinians um and and Muhammad El-Kher talks about this in in his latest book but that you know they people just see them and they're almost like characters to us that are supposed to die like that's how we treat Palestinians so their death actually has no effect unfortunately um on on on most of the world beyond just virtue signaling um it's it because it's almost like baked into how the regular things are supposed to go you know um so it that's why it took so it's taken it took so many and it's continued to take so many of them to die for folks to find a conscious now we know that people who've had a conscious the whole time about this but for a while you know you have all these articles that came out the last year about how I'm now against this you know after two years of slaughter like oh now gets genocide like okay so it's a certain way that you know that doesn't have an effect but to your question I could go off on that all day but to your question um Israel's Israel is a illegal you know occupation a project that's what it is it's stolen land that's what the entire project is not just the parts that Palestinians live on now the whole thing um and you know they don't they don't care again how you confront them because they're not giving up the land if anything they just want to keep expanding it that's the greater Israel or what a project or whatever right like they think they're the whole middle east you if you let them tell it so they're not sharing the land and there's no appeal to them I don't think Palestinians were trying to appeal to Israel at all I'm sure they're way past that point but they were at least trying to appeal maybe to the rest of the world and the rest of the world as usual was not I was unable to come through um but the enemy is not does not care and this case particularly Israel or whether you march and return or whether you you know I was go flood the only difference that they make is they just see one is a reason to kill more people than the other because they're like oh now that they actually like rolls up arms not just rocks or stones or like straight up arms like oh now we really can go him and just wipe them out like it just gives them more justification so again we talked about the body count earlier in the sense that you are you are maybe facing more but that's still the difference basically all this is just a reason to go even further yeah this is just a reason to intensify what we're already doing um but like I said neither a knife nor a hug makes a difference they want the land they don't they're not they just don't make the distinction and I so like you said it's it's method independent because we're we have to be clear thinking about what does the enemy actually want what is the thing that they want and how are we threatening that if we're talking about this from an organizing perspective how are we threatening that and how are they going to be willing to respond to our us threatening that that's it if you're threatening it you're threatening it how you were threatening it is just a simple question of what is better to get you get you your objectives met so maybe maybe walking maybe a march of return is is a better way to get your objectives met than I ask a flood maybe you know I'm talking about metaphorically speaking maybe maybe not but those are the only questions I think we need to be asking ourselves in what time I'd be at say maybe even if we understand the limitations of this space maybe the electoral spaces of is one of the better ways of struggle compared to something else because we don't have the kind of forces elsewhere those are arguments I think people should continue to have it's not that they're not already having them those are real arguments that because it's just a question of what is going to advance our goals not the morality of it so much the morality is the fact that we're trying to get free that we're already we already have the moral high ground we don't need to argue anything else you know like we already got that because we're we're oppressed we don't need anything else to really make the case so whatever gets you there is really for me the question you know and if if people can make a case that the nonviolent or as I'm calling the sacrificial violent methods other ways to get through there then you know I'm not it obviously I'm not out here just shooting everybody up so obviously I'm open to that perspective you know but I'm just saying at the end of the day you we do have to think about it in that sense what gets us there and and stay focused on that and not do like what I said earlier where you get lost in the soup of it and now you're all like cozy and open the bear when you originally we're just trying to figure out tactically out of the feet the bear now you're like on this bear side and now you're still lying to yourself telling yourself that well if you work with the bear you can like secretly get them to do what you want like that's not how this works that they the bear never really loses focus you know that's us that do that so like they know what they want they're pretty clear on that you know yeah and you know I think that's that's so important and exactly to your point I think to build off of that the issue with settler colonialism as you made clear that the land is the honey and so even when we're talking about nonviolent versus violent approaches to trying to you know self-determined in that context from a national liberation perspective it's not even even deeper than that it's your it's your very existence on the land so even if you decided I'm not going to protest at all right like I'm not even going to do the nonviolent or violent I'm just going to keep my head down and try to get by the Palestinians are still being killed they're still being slaughtered same as that concept with the US settler colonialism it didn't matter how the indigenous people of North America resisted whether they resisted violently nonviolent or just tried to live their own life in their own territory they were still slaughtered because the land is the honey and in so far as you're on it your existence is a threat to that to the bear because the honey is underneath your feet and so settler colonialism in particular is so nefarious because no matter what you do even if you do nothing you will still be killed yeah is it's funny something this isn't this doesn't align perfectly what you say because I think land is important here but it's funny I was really into some dr. King's stuff and he was talking about um he was talking about he finds it interesting that people um when they would would say they couldn't come out to a protest or something he's talking particularly about men who said they can't come out to a protest because they're going to get shot or not get shot but they don't want to get spit on or they're they can't let somebody hit them like they'll have to respond like they're not going to take it and he was like well you get spit on every day and you I don't do anything like it's like I'm I'm I'm paraphrasing it but he basically said it's like you get spit on every day all the time he was like you know all the all the nonsense that happens to to us all the time you you don't really do much so coming out to a rally or something um can't be much different than your day-to-day life like basically like at least if you're doing it here you're doing it to try to win something right um so it's to say like to your point this violence happens even if you take out the confrontation and you just are living this is going to happen to you particularly in the case of Palestinians because they're on land as someone wants that someone is not willing to concede under any circumstances unless they're met with the same force right so you're you you are forced into a situation where you're damned if you're doing you're damned if you don't quite you know quite literally so you have to think about it in that sense so if you're willing to if you want to just put your head down and go to work and all of that you know that's we know one's going to judge you or I'm not going to judge you for that but it doesn't mean you can necessarily avoid what is an inevitable thing even when we get outside of the conversation of confrontation because especially when it's someone like an Israel it's all encompassing it kills people who have nothing to do with it as we as we see it as people who are not who who's never kidnapped anyone who's never shot anybody who's never even thrown a stone it will just you can just get shot in in the West Bank just being in the vicinity of of some IDF soldier who's mad at a kid one day and just randomly goes off or some settler that goes off and kills someone like this can just happen to anybody you know because you know this is an award that really doesn't discriminate right so and that death will be just as dismissed likely as the one of somebody throwing the rock or shooting a gun particularly in that context right so yeah you're living in a situation of people who are relentless and I think you know I'm curious what you think about this and maybe this leads to even what we're talking about with this this question of suffering and cleansing but you know there's been and sometimes within like the humanist contemporary space is like you know this people don't believe in evil effectively you know and I don't as even as someone who's not religious at all I genuinely I do believe in evil you know I think you can materially see it I don't think it's some you know spooky concept and I think sometimes us not wanting like everything being relative morally relative sometimes I just feel like we're not really grappling with evil sometimes like just the depths of just how horrible and heinous things really are it's almost as if we dismiss it for something like that's that's even people who materialists sometimes do that I think too much that's that gross materialism Mark talks about whereas it's you're not really reckoning with what's really in front of you and how how heinous and how much of a threat it really is because when we really just as we're talking I'm just thinking about like you say you're living in a place where somebody can literally take the shift from you and that makes you a threat because you just exist on land like that's really horrible you know morally speaking but like it's like we don't quite want to deal with how horrible that is because what you would have to do in response to that level evil I don't think a lot of us are willing to do so it's easy to say I don't believe in evil in essence you know yeah I think there's a there's a tendency towards reductionism in materialism broadly that can when in its vulgar forms can try to reduce everything's down to so base a substance that it collapses things like morality in its totality and so that's I think the vulgar aspect you're getting at when I think dialectics re brings that brings that back into focus and says this is a this is a real dynamic here going on and and I think there's a moral spiritual force to to seeing evil as it is like there is evil in the world and that doesn't have to come with a certain set of metaphysics but it does have to come with a certain sort of moral clarity that it's not just about you know raw material needs although that is the base of the of the conflict there is evil whether they look at the Epstein files right like there's no material need for the ruling class to rape and traffic children but they do it because they are evil and and because they believe themselves to be so intrinsically superior to everybody else that they live above not only normal morality but normal sets of laws and that nobody's there to hold them accountable and because they already have everything that a normal person might want you know all the money in the world all the power in the world the desiring for more the desire for total domination manifests itself in in that sort of profound moral degeneracy so yes I do think I do think evil absolutely exist and it's not the whole puzzle but it is a crucial part of it and I think speaking in moral terms and not always centering but always creating room for the moral critique of the system speaks to people on a level that that sometimes mere materialist analysis simply doesn't because it speaks to your heart it gets people emotionally invested in the fight against this rotten evil fucking system so I do think it's important in that way no if or so yeah I think it's I think sometimes there's a retreat too much I mean even it's not just even the terrorists I was at a I got I don't know how I got it well I was speaking for some progressive church and I had a thing called materializing evil it was literally the name of it like we could or materializing the devil that's what it was called like we can actually see the devil in like poverty and shit like that right like we can see it in these terms whether we believe in some kind of force outside of nature that's different but like you this is demonic in every way that your book defines I was just trying to that's how I was trying to like connect with the audience so I put it in their terms totally but you know it was a wild and to know I don't like it too far away from the questions here but it was just wild to see I was like wild but it was odd that even some of them in that progressive Christian space had moved away from my concepts of the devil and evil like they didn't believe in it so it's not even just like Marxist or you know like materialists or or you know atheists or non-believers or whatever you know it's even in all spaces there's a certain agnosticism to evil you know which is odd to me you know considering the world we're in absolutely yeah that is odd and I totally understand your point of speaking in religious terms to that audience and I always argue that religion is a terrain of struggle and I think religion also represents a genuine sphere of human knowledge insofar as it's a unique attempt to try to deal with questions that are just outside of science or morality or even philosophy it's trying to deal with the deepest existential questions and how we relate to infinity to the eternal what our lives mean in the context of the cosmos as we understand it and there is a rhetorical force a moral force to operate on that terrain and to speak in that language and using something like I'll say like it's you know like this Christian nationalism is what is actually meant by using God's name in vain right God using God's name in vain does not say use is not like don't say God damn it right you know it means don't use God and Jesus's name as a fig leaf to advance a system or a movement that stands against every single thing that a loving God would stand for or that Jesus Christ himself spent his life messaging about like that is literally anti-Christ it doesn't it doesn't mean yet to believe in some supernatural force necessarily but it's just like even from a material perspective or just the logical coherency of the system itself this is a anti-Christ movement that is using God's name in vain and I think there's something powerful in putting it in those terms yeah I think that's yeah as some people say that's a good word but yeah I think that's yeah you're literally using the name in vain to you know to advance imperialism to advance murder to advance genocide like that should be that should be a poly right but again if we're thinking about like you know Ingalls talks about idealism is an abstraction to another abstraction so you just don't get to you know get to like ultimately do anything about it because it's just like that's what I've said only about the hypocrisy part which might seem like I'm contradicting myself but it's in terms of all be called the hypocrisy but you know you I do something but then I'm saying you still need to know that this is evil but that just needs to inspire you to do more than just be like this is bad like I think that's also the problem with morality in a liberal sense is it's just like I said it's just naming it's just it's just it's just catharsis to say that it happened and it's like no this is if someone's using your God's name in vain like you know that should be the end of it and I was reading some of the like some of the pacifists and the abolitionists and it was this is reading of the Sordos book on nonviolence and he was quoting some of them my Charles Sterns and others and they were very clear for them you know they really did wrestle with their faith and you know facing the south and they ultimately came to the side that we're going to have to stand with the union not the union was amazing but at least it's going to end slavery or something like we can't do this anymore like they were very clear that we have to you know I mean some of them are very explicit you read some of the language I was reading and on a few other podcasts but they were like you know these are not even human beings like I don't believe in killing human beings these are not human beings like that that's not big that's how I feel about the Epstein class yeah like these are these are terrible individuals and they need to be taken out boy and lord boy garrison even said that he thinks slavery's directions were an advancement for humanity because of how bad slavery was like it was just that actually grapple with it because originally they were like we want to end this nonviolently we want to end this through procedure and they realized that just can't happen you know like we're going to have to do something more and again I had got to say these things are not comfortable to really think about because it does up in a lot of the life most of us live but I mean you know you either do what you don't I don't know you know like yeah absolutely yeah so I have many I could keep talking on that but let's let's go ahead and move forward let's touch on one or two more questions here as we wrap up I do want to talk a little bit about you your juxtaposition of Martin Luther King Jr.'s redemptive suffering and setting it a alongside phanon's violence as a cleansing force right these are seemingly totally different approaches to the very concept of violence and a lot of people do treat them as as total opposites but dialectically there's an interesting sort of synthesis or sort of grappling with the same contradiction that can be that can be uniting of the seemingly disparate opinions so just kind of like any any thoughts on on that and why you used those two figures and those two approaches in the same way in particular yeah I'll read a few things just a frame that for people you know some things you've going to an essay you kind of know you want to touch on this was actually not one of them this came up I did read I did reread concerning violence because it just felt like a good grounding to write this but I didn't really expect to quote it much but you know a lot of people have messed with that passage and the violence cleansing but you know so I'd always I've seen that and I mean I grew up in Christian church and suffering and redemption was very much a part of it I had never really put the two together you know until this essay so there's a quote from King that I admit it is hard to even sit with sometimes this is something he wrote in in his book following him out government boy bus boycott and there's a there's a chapter in it I think the chapter seven I think but it was called the pilgrimage to my pilgrimage to non-violence and he walks through his it's kind of intellectual genealogy of how he became what he is and he you know talks through different philosophy he's in blah blah blah but at some point you know he's gotten past that and he's defending non-violence but and he says um by my home's threaten our children seniorhooded perpetuators of violence into our communities and drag us out on some wayside road beating us and leaving us half dead and we will still love you but we will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer that that's a hard quote to swallow up mentally anytime I read it to people they're just kind of you know like especially we start talking about our children it's like not me you know like that's that's just not like that was itself when you know um and so originally yes I I think I just kept writing and I didn't really like sit with just kind of how off-putting that is and so first I was just trying to sit with how off-putting it was and not just like you know sometimes you can drop a quote when you just keep going um and you don't really sit with what someone said you just kind of used it to reinforce what you're saying so I wanted to sit with that a little bit and then as I sat with it that's when in this idea of when Phnom says in concerning violence which is in the broader book of wrensitive the earth but the chapters concerning violence at the level of individuals violence is a cleansing force um and some people take that to say that you know Phnom is somehow celebrating violence or he enjoys it or but he's saying that you know kind of like a little bit of even what you were saying early in terms of evening the odds of bid you're reclaiming something by by returning what the violence has already been imposed on you there's a certain dignity and respect that you are reclaiming and doing it um you know even if blood has to be shed because there's been a certain violence opposed imposed on you as a colonial subject so you're saying that there that violence is cleansing because I have to engage in it nonetheless even if I'm going to engage in it offensively. Dr. King is saying that there's a level of violence that will happen that needs to happen to in there's another level of violence and it's kind of suffering with violence that needs to happen to change the heart of someone to to bring like respect as he said or to redeem his white brother from a permanent death of the spirit so there's both of them are acknowledging that someone has to die or someone needs to be hurt in order to restore something even if it's from very different size and I'm sure of you could bring them back from the dead and sit them in the same room they wouldn't really agree on that but for me when I read it it was just like yeah King in a way is saying and and I'm not taking that this quote is not out of context that whole chapter has some of these like it has this kind of sense to it you know like almost almost daring people you know to kill you right but saying that there's a redemptive quality that that can transform people because he felt like violence was a it's it's just how to downward spiral to it it just it just be yet even worse things that's how King felt for non-obviously felt like violence could lead you to a you know in a positive place because it could it could restore order to what he called a Mancunian world that's been imposed on them by by the colonial by the colonial powers but in both cases there's a certain level of violence that needs to be done to bring about a better world you know like they're both saying it they're just saying one has to engage in it quite literally another has to in a way suffer through it you know and the Christian doctrine particularly the ones that the Kings and stuff who in the kind of Baptist tradition but even more broadly this kind of be dimptive I've heard talk I actually talk a few theologians to try to work this out but you know there's a certain like I think they call it a Tomit theology and there's a certain way that you have to die to come back there's a certain way that people have to go through it to then be reborn that's even in the idea of Jesus as someone had to die on across very violently I might add to well to them be brought back and that is really deeply embedded in the faith but I think sometimes this not people deal with the redemptive part and all the transformative part but to do that violence is like the transactional thing that does it you know you have to die you have to be killed you have to be you have to suffer you have to go through something very horrible you know jolves family is killed you know which I never really could wrestle with in the book but jolves family is killed to prove that you know that he's faithful like there's this certain kind of suffering that you have to go through when there's certain scholars that have written in that criticize that even within the Christian doctrine like my girls a womanist theologian she's criticized that but yeah but suffering becomes a a kind of like thing that you have to do but funnels not saying saying like we've suffered enough so like we were not suffering any further so it's a cleansing force because it you know waking somebody to the reality that they have to face like I don't so I don't know that makes sense but that's what I was wrestling with the scene like damn these are these things are actually speaking to each other in ways that I don't think we've really sat with before I think that's that's so deep it literally takes me a back and makes me start contemplating and being forced to sit with that and these two these two seemingly oppositional traditions that dovetail in that incredibly interesting way underneath all the rhetoric and I kind of think you know you talk about Joe or Abraham having to sacrifice Isaac or Socrates drinking the hemlock willing to die for for his beliefs or in the Christian tradition explicitly right Jesus Christ being nailed to the cross screaming out forgive them father for they know not what they do telling his disciples not to resist to allow his own suffering to occur to play out and there's a there's a truth in our in our lives in a micro way that in order to become deeper people in order for our character in in our spiritual depth to grow like we have to go through suffering right a life of comfort and ease and frictionlessness does not produce a strong character and you know the weakest characters are often had and embodied by the most pampered and luxurious people even in our own society look at a figure like Elon Musk he has all the material comfort he could ever want and has the character that has never grown past the age of 13 precisely because he hasn't had to suffer or when he has he hasn't faced up to it or lived to it in any way that would be a catalyst for depth or growth and then on the non-side there's a there's a dehumanization think about slave revolts right a dehumanization in total domination like you are stripped of your humanity by being so firmly under the boot and to rise up to rip the boot off of the foot and to stab the throat of the owner of that boot there is something redemptive and something rehumanizing by that act of extreme fucking violence so it's like I don't have an easy answer here and I'm just kind of restating things that you've already said but it is it is it is quite profound to really think through that seeming dichotomy yeah like that's what said violence is because what I'm saying United is the the cleansing part is that in some way violence is cleansing um whether it's through literal death or whether it's through you just sort of forms of struggle um but it seems to be that king is saying like you can do all these things to us and we will still wear you down right and that's where you got to respect it even if it sounds crazy to some people like the capacity he says to suffer the capacity to overcome you know whatever you might throw at me but it's it's saying that's the way we're going to cleanse away violence is our capacity to suffer that's that's what they that's what the philosophy firmly believed in and for known is saying you know we're gonna we're gonna cleanse away violence by your capacity to suffer we've already suffered you're gonna suffer you know like we're gonna wear you down through your capacity to suffer because we have experienced such total as you said the total boot on our neck we have nothing left to to hold on to we only thing we have left is to reclaim it and this is one way we will reclaim it you know we we you you've stripped this of so much you know that that yes I will reclaim it and I don't care like Malcolm said you know we don't care about odds you know we don't we don't we don't care about the we don't want to hear about that right like this is this is even even that is somewhat I don't think for known was trying to be spiritual but you can make a spiritual case even for that because it's to say I know people you know they'll take issue with the maybe gendered language but when folks say I'm a man or if you want to take it some of that I am a human like you're not going to I'm still like a living breathing being and you're not going to like step on me like I'm not and that is a reclaiming you know and and and not only you're not going to stop me like I'm going to get back at you you know like some people think revenge is inherently bad or vengeance is inherently bad I think Vino is saying not really you know yeah yeah because you've been polls like he says you've been posed this black and white world on me like I have no control over that so it's it's my job to to turn it evenly it's my job it's actually justice to to bring it back to my side and this is a way I'm going to do it yeah and at some point right suffering at some gratuitous point suffering ceases to to offer redemption yeah at some point total complete suffering with no end in sight fails to provide the possibility of redemption and I think Fanon is is pointing towards that like you know at the at the other end of total domination we've suffered all week and suffer there's no more suffering that you could impose on us that would have any redemptive qualities and so at that point the pendulum must swing back in the other direction and I have deep love and respect for king in that entire tradition and I find it fascinating and ponderous and it makes me want to sit back and just contemplate for sure but like there's something deep in my belly that gets that gets lit up when Fanon talks and like my there's a certain bias my being has in the Phononian direction yeah like like yeah because it's just I mean we all have a breaking point and I think that's why that kind of stuff is relatable you know even when people do it much worse than like when people don't I mean I say much worse when people don't do it nearly as well as Phonon does it in terms of how they put it when they even appeal to you know lower traits of ourselves it's still part of us that all has a breaking point and as he talks about who hasn't dreamed of doing these things back like they've all dreamed of like Phonon wasn't just writing out of his head like he was he was a psychiatrist he's talking to folks all the time he's he's hearing the psychology of these folks and he knows like you know this is this is this is this is the world that's imposed on you so it's like no I'm not going to sit here and just let you you know step on my neck and and I do nothing about it and I think in again in King's case and stuff I do think that they're saying I've even heard this from even some of the political prisoners I work with where you know they're like I'm free anywhere right I'm free in prison you can there's like a certain thing I'm not going to let you take from me and I think that's also what King is saying like and and others in that tradition like there's a certain humanity that your violence will not be able to beat out of me right I will still be able to hold on to it even when you do all that so I get both sides of it I I agree I more so ride with the Phonone you know especially when it actually comes down to it like in real life like I don't think I'm gonna be like you're not gonna you can't take away like I probably wouldn't be to take the perspective of the king and take of him really in that position like no I'm always gonna be plotting to see how I can slice you throw you know if I'm in the just yeah I don't know if I could really you know but also I'm not in that circumstance like to their to respect to the respect the both of them they also went through these things true you know they didn't just write about it so so I respect both sides of it you know but I found a certain unity there that I'd never noticed that was one of the most surprising parts about writing this yeah and I think it's one of the most most brilliant points and you know hats off to you for for exploring that in a way that you know in these issues on these topics cover these books covered phonons wretched of the earth have never really heard such a such a deep sort of analysis of that that particular dialectics so you know hats off to you so we have we have more questions I don't know I'm kind of up against a hard stop point on my end I just want to maybe as a way to wrap this conversation up give you the floor to say anything else that you didn't you weren't able to mention about the essay thus far any any last words in general and then after that we can move into maybe lessons to take away from this and where people can find you in your work online but I I want to give you the chance to say anything that you felt like you haven't said yet yeah I mean we didn't give as much as the historical examples but I think people that's why people have to actually read the essay so we don't have to touch too much on those I think they're helpful to frame and ground the argument I'm working on part two now and part two is more part a while it will then engage more the the kind of conversation we did today because it's kind of helps me think through parts two because part two is more like I think I established fairly well that you know this is violence and part two is still attempting to establish that this is really just probably one essay so I've had to kind of rework how part two was we're part two is a lot of what was supporting the first argument now have to make a different one to an extent to make it even worth reading otherwise it's just an addendum which I don't want to write that so part two is just wrestling with think I might even have the opening line I'll just read the opening line let me see here here it is yeah when living under oppression even the gunk underneath this boot can become a weapon right and it's like that somehow kind of hit me as something to sit with like so on one end I'm trying to say non-violence as we've kind of already articulated doesn't stand above anything right it's just as much part of the gunk under the boot of oppression as you know violence or arm struggle is it doesn't it's a response to being caught up in all this gunk and you are having to use gunk as a weapon because the neck is so deeply on your neck that you can't even reach for anything else so non-violence comes out of that too as much as it tries to be ideal is it can't really escape the fact that it's right there with everything everybody else is trying to figure out a way the people who swing stab are just as much right next to the folks that do you know that are willing to take the swing and then the stabbing right like they don't stand above it but at the same time yes that's true but at the same time there's nothing's respect for you know people are since they are under the boot they have to make they have to make concessions sometimes to get off from under the boot right we can we can respect that too like they're not um you know none of these decisions should be understood since we're already critiquing idealism none of these decisions should be understood as these easy decisions that one should make when you are facing bull Connor or um the French or any of these entities everything is going to be colored by that right like there's no getting around that um so trying to combine those two things but then it also says in a way like non-violence is kind of a um it's kind of a prop more of a proper gander than it is a reality you know because it's like it needs a more high ground but it's not to like move forward but in reality it's not really doing non-violence like I say so the other two arguments I'm making is like you have to either become a state or collaborate with a state and to do that you have to engage in violence you know because the state's not non-violence no matter if you want to call a capitalist socialist they don't really care it's like a state either has to defend a if you're an independent movement you have to defend your independence and you're not going to be able to defend that through hunger strikes and you know non-violent action you're gonna have a military to do that and if you are a movement within a country like the civil rights movement you're going to have to appeal to some extent to parts of the state to enforce um the laws that protect you and those laws are not enforced through through uh harmony and love necessarily they're enforced through the fact that someone has a gun that somebody has a prison to put somebody in that somebody can enforce a law and if it's not followed they can inflict some kind of penalty on it right so but as long as I'm not going to maintain a certain level of veneer of innocence like it can appear like it's that it almost has it almost can disassociate from the very things it has to engage to even like progress or advance its own struggle so that's that's what I'm working through in the next one just to kind of give people since it was to calm yeah yeah and by of course you know open invite I would love to have you back on to discuss that piece once it's once it's fully finished and I'll link to this in the show notes there is things we couldn't get to there are historical examples that really flesh some of these these lines of argument and lines of thought really out quite well um and it's it's really that the first part is not a long read like you I think you can read it under 15 minutes even close reading under 15 minutes so I encourage people who have been at all inspired or motivated by this conversation to dive into the piece itself and all of your other work right I've had you on the show several times at this point um to discuss your book and your other your other work and and I want to make sure people can find that so working people find you your podcast and your other work online me can find me a black liberation media that's what we do our podcast that on YouTube or you can just find black nips podcast on Spotify Apple everywhere else where you listen to it um you know you can find me it um sometimes I have too much shit on me involved in man uh but but too hyphen black dot com um I'm also a poet also I don't really maybe one day I need couple of here actually talk about poetry but also had that done that most of my life don't do it as much so you can find me through that um you can but more than anything like you know talk about political prisoners you can support the penultin to at penultin to dot com that's just the word penultin and the number two dot com and and I'm also a member of black alliance for peace as well absolutely um huge shout out to black alliance for peace and I'll link to your podcast penultin to dot com um your your website all of that in the show notes so so people can find you and of course we do have other episodes with you so um if you if you enjoy this conversation go check those out they're all on different topics and they're all incredibly important I really appreciate all the work you do as an organizer as a thinker as an intellectual as an artist um it's it's really inspiring and you bring a depth of analysis and and a clarity to some of these questions that I really deeply appreciate so thank you so much for coming on and um it's without a doubt that we'll talk again soon now for so thank you definitely definitely appreciate it I was loving so (upbeat music)