As far as I can tell, climate activists have been making a nuisance of themselves much more than a 'willingness to use violence.' I find this justification concerning, to say the least.
Typically when shit kicks off, it's an agent provocateur. Not always, but typically: https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-helped-ignite-george-floyd-rio...
There was similar in Oakland, some white kids from who tf knows where were trying to break windows, and everyone around was shouting for them to fuck off and knock it off.
Recently nazis and right wingers were allowed to do whatever they want as cops stood by and watched them beat up college protesters. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/16/us/ucla-student-protests-... At one point one shouted "we're here to finish what Hitler started" https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/uclas-unholy-alliance/
Agent provocateurs are going to become more and more necessary to "justify" the violence against protesters as protesters become more educated on pacifist strategies.
The Anarchist Cookbook (new version) https://www.foodnotbombs.net/anarchist_cookbook.html is free to read and gets into the effectiveness of peaceful protest and direct action, and the counter-effectiveness of violence.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Blow_Up_a_Pipeline takes a slightly different perspective, analyzing the possible necessity of extremely limited, targeted destruction of property, that strives to be completely disassociated from the greater movement so that the benefits of the destruction (such as disrupted oil supply, plus attention) can be combined with the opportunity for the greater movement to condemn the action.
If you randomly shoot at a anti-fa rally and hit 100% meth heads and felons there's an issue with anti-fa rallies.
So, Kyle Rittenhouse was shooting randomly into the crowd? Interesting, I wonder what his goal was in doing so.
Seems only one of the three people shot was a pedophile. That's ok, though, 1/3 is certainly a majority, I agree with you, it indicates that basically everyone at the protest was a pedophile. Except Kyle and his friend. And anyway, the other person killed had a criminal record of violence - I wonder how Kyle was able to identify that when he shot him in the middle of the crowd? We could potentially leverage this technique in a new machine vision model. Luckily Kyle killed him before he could commit more crimes. Once someone commits a crime, they might commit more, and should be shot by unelected strangers without a trial.
As for the third, a notorious anti-cop creep that would frequently get arrested for doing weird things like photographing police stations and the cars parked there. Degenerate behavior, he's lucky police never harass and frequently arrest those weirdo first amendment audit types. If they did, there would be obvious signs, such as a huge list of overturned convictions and dismissed court cases. Anyway the guy was probably a pedophile, because the first guy was.
Thank god a child brought a rifle to a protest.
Today there are enough meth heads that the only thing police need to do for violence at a rally to explode is nothing.
I don't have the source at hand but I remember reading that in Germany, plain clothes police inserted themselves into the group of climate protestors and start throwing rocks at the riot police, in order to give them legal justification to engage the protestors.
Don't know if this is the truth, but since this has also happened in my country in the past, I wouldn't be surprised that it is. Governments and the ruling elite can and will always find ways to legally justify their actions against citizens they consider a threat. The US had the Pinkertons (who stil exist today) who did similar actions but for the private sector.
And even if by a miracle you do manage to get the face of that person and submit it to law enforcement, if they happened to be part of one of the intelligence agencies like it was in my country, the government would turn a blind eye and pretend they cant identify that person in order to protect them.
Throwing LEOs under the bus, even if they're guilty of something, is not something most government leaders are rushing to do since they need LEOs on their side in order to enforce the laws and maintain their positions in society, and it's not a good idea to piss off those in charge of the guns and surveillance capabilities and turn them against you.
Wherever there are truly peaceful protests against governments there is a very high probability that governmental agents infiltrated among the protestants will attempt to cause violent incidents in order to provide justification for the police to attack the participants with excessive force.
Maybe I misunderstand what you mean, but generally people who participate in peaceful protests isn't willing to use violence, then they'd be a part of a different type of protest. That's not to say there are groups within peaceful protests that are willing to use violence, but it isn't the norm.
You have to know how to suffer for what is important.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mahatma-Gandhi/Resistan...
"Thus was born satyagraha (“devotion to truth”), a new technique for redressing wrongs through inviting, rather than inflicting, suffering, for resisting adversaries without rancor and fighting them without violence."
With that out of the way, maybe ideals is too charged of a word. Maybe the right word here is: priorities.
Why must it be the people suffering the consequence of greedy politicians, who must be the ones behaving with the high moral compass?
This seems to me like blaming the victims
Edit to add:
> You have to know how to suffer for what is important.
With that principle, people who have the decisional power should "suffer" by refraining from causing harm to others/the planet
I agree. But can we really only blame the politicians? I do not vote because every politician wants war. That is my small protest that aligns with my morals. They have to earn my vote. What if there were a group of people who got together and said we will only vote for the candidate that is against all war or where serious about climate change?
>Why must it be the people suffering the consequence of greedy politicians, who must be the ones behaving with the high moral compass?
Yes, unfortunate, but the only way out is for those of us with a moral compass to act as an example for others. To be the heroes who sacrifice and are remembered through history and change things for the better.
Start in your town. Keep it local.
But I am sad to see that bringing up Ghandi here even leads to downvotes of my original comment.
But I will also argue, imagine if he did nothing?
> But I will also argue, imagine if he did nothing?
I think that India would still have gotten independence a few years later, since either way, I don't think post-WW2 Britain had the capacity to hold on to India. However, I do believe that Gandhi's efforts ended up playing a significant role in creating a more unified national identity and helped to foster values that have allowed India to be a mostly stable democracy, in stark contrast to many of its neighbors. So, if he had done nothing, I figure that India might've fragmented into smaller countries with too much conflict to amount to much on the global stage.
Post-enlightenment, we put down the torches and pitchforks, we outsourced the accountability function to the media/press. Shame and transparency were the new "torch and pitchforks".
As soon as the likes of Rupert Murdoch/Roger Ailes etc. got involved in media, the press no longer wields the people's power, which was delegated to them, for the people. Instead the press selectively uses that power for ulterior aims - whether that's the Oil & Gas industry, the war machine, or for foreign interests.
After Clinton, and in order to push the illegal Iraq war, politicians (no longer called "leaders") had to shed all their shame so that they would be immune to any press that came out about their illegal acts for the war machine. Wikileaks happened. Only the messenger was pursued.
Shame doesn't work anymore. The press use the power we gave them against us. Therefore no wonder protests don't work. They don't get covered and politicians are rewarded for shamelessly ignoring the people's interests.
The system is broken.
I don't blame climate protesters escalating. Especially while climate destruction is being escalated.
How does this square with the rise of insurgents like donald trump? He was basically snubbed by the GOP political establishment in 2016, but now the republican party is now enthralled to him. There was even a period where he tried to fight fox news and urged his supporters to watch OAN instead. Some of Trump's populist policies were so successful that even the democratic party copied it, eg. his anti-china policy. That's despite such policies being arguably anti-business, which under your framework shouldn't have happened.
Just as the press usurped our power to block us out of it. Trump usurped the media's power (through his own showmanship) to block them out of it (this was the only reason CNN libs were mad really). At the end of the day Trump did the bidding of the common backgrounds interests so he was allowed to play the part:
- Sold $100s of billions of weapons to dictators (MIC) - His anti-china policy was solely to stop their EVs from taking over the gas car market in the US (Oil & Gas) - Escalated tensions in the middle east to keep netanyahu in power through the Abraham Weapons Deal and moving the US embassy illegally to Jerusalem (Foreign Interests)
The politicians, the media, they fall over, and fight amongst, each other to be top slave to these same various lobbies. The public are only there insofar to keep the facade in-tact, every 4 years people stand in line to larp as casting directors in the great pantomime. Most western states do not live in free, representative democracies - all the ones with significant sway have been totally usurped (in other countries we'd call it coups).
And unfortunately, the tech industry is now going in that direction (with YC now accepting MIC projects, lazy zero-alpha investors and VCs are crawling to the DoD infinite-money-glitch teat).
Read "Silent Coup" by Matt Kennard & Claire Provost[https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Silent_Coup/gjmvEAAAQ...]
Feels like for each of these, you can weave an alternate story with another set of benefactors if the opposite action was taken. For instance, his being pro china would benefit corporate interests through globalization, allowing multinationals to bleed the rust belt even more. Or that signing the Iran deal actually means Russia benefits somehow (dunno, maybe so their client state/ally isn't sanctioned anymore?) and trump is in the pockets of Russian oligarchs. Point is, no matter what policies get enacted, there's going to be someone benefiting, which means you can accuse the people in charge for doing "the bidding of the common backgrounds interests". Even something that should be an unalloyed good (eg. FTC outlawing noncompetes) can be cynically written off as "that's just them throwing us a bone to keep us placated".
To put another way, what would convince you that your theory is false? A full socialist revolution?
If you were to ask me what I want. I want consistency and honesty. If politicians want to do the bidding of lobbies then don't waste our time with the quadrennial dog and pony show. If the press/media refuses to keep the powerful to account then just give us our torches and pitchforks back. If the justice system can be abused by people with power and money to squash the little guy then just rename it to something else. If international law only applies to what the status quo considers subhumans then just get rid of the ICC/ICJ and the entire concept of International Law. If profit motive is more important than the continuation of life on earth then just say so and stop paying useless consultants millions of dollars while the world burns and allow people who care about the climate to escalate as they see fit. If corporations are allowed to massacre people with their negligence and the "justice system" does nothing to hold them to account then just allow the people to do the same to negligent corporations. This whole setup of one side can always do the bad thing yet the other side always needs to politely go through "the right channels" to get an ounce of recourse is tiring. It's either "law & order" or the "law of the jungle" for all of us or none of us.
I agree that most climate activism is more nuisance than violent, but that doesn't mean violence doesn't happen.
But in the grand scheme of things this is indeed a weak justification.
And it's interesting to me that when 'violence' is used on this specific topic, it seems to only be used to label the reaction of the protesters and not the underlying issue they're protesting about, which itself is also a form of violence.
> the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
Unless the latter is the point, consider an edit that addresses my point directly. I am only human. It is possible that there is a flaw in my reasoning. It is possible coffee did not hit me yet.
As written, this is not an argument at all.
What the comment does in its original form is draw attention to the nonsensical cowardice of refusing to take a stand on any issue. "There's no such thing as good violence" has you condemning slave revolutions for example. "There's no such thing as hate speech" refuses to acknowledge the forces and choices that led to historical atrocities and abdicates power to notice and prevent them. There's no future in this enlightened centrism, nothing to refute because it refuses to take a stand.
Someone smarter than me wrote:
> Anarchists dedicated to nonviolent direct action are not opposed to all forms of property damage. It can be an effective strategy if the decision to do it involves all participants, the target chosen is one that will guarantee no one who is not part of the action could be injured, and the method used does not frighten the public.
> A simple example is the Food Not Bombs actions taken the night of August 19th... we spray-painted the outline of "dead” bodies on the ground, stenciled mushroom clouds with the word “Today?” and wheat-pasted "War is Murder for Profit" posters along the route that the weapons buyers and sellers would take from their hotel to the conference hall. taking credit for hundreds of dollars in graffiti damage to Boston University's property. Who did this frighten into the arms of the state? No one.
Rebecca Solnit wrote:
> I want to be clear that property damage is not necessarily violence. The firefighter breaks the door to get the people out of the building. But the husband breaks the dishes to demonstrate to his wife that he can and may also break her. It’s violence displaced onto the inanimate as a threat to the animate.
> Quietly eradicating experimental GMO crops or pulling up mining claim stakes is generally like the firefighter. Breaking windows during a big demonstration is more like the husband. I saw the windows of a Starbucks and a Niketown broken in downtown Seattle after nonviolent direct action had shut the central city and the World Trade Organization ministerial down. I saw scared-looking workers and knew that the CEOs and shareholders were not going to face that turbulence and they sure were not going to be the ones to clean it up. Economically it meant nothing to them.
https://www.foodnotbombs.net/a.%20Anarchist%20Cookbook%20int...
In any case, the (Cambridge English) dictionary's definition of "violence" remains "actions that are intended or likely to hurt people or cause damage" (you'll note that what firefighters might do is not intended to cause damage while vandalism obviously is), and the law indeed makes this a criminal offence for a reason.
I'm half expecting someone to seriously claim at some point that an instant death is not violence because there is no suffering...
I disagree that highly cited Solnit is engaging in "obviously dishonest mental gymnastics" and can be safely ignored. Now what?
Great, you found another definition of violence, let's apply your definition to your own example.
Note that your definition includes "intended or likely." For some reason you ignore the "intended to" when discussing firefighters. Firefighters are obviously intending to cause damage to a door they axe down. Why is this not violence and why is this not a criminal offense? It's violence per your definition.
Do you want to use the same word to describe, and justify the criminalization of, all things that can be described by this word? It sounds like you don't because you seem to want to indicate that a firefighter axing a door and a protester bricking a window are different things, and that one is bad and one is good.
If you're ok with using the same word to describe both, then there's not really a point in discussing whether something is violence or not - many things good and bad are violence, and so we don't need to determine if something is violence or not to determine if the action should be criminalized, we need to consider other factors.
If you're not ok with using the same word to describe both, then we need to engage in what you're erroneously describing as "goal post moving." It's actually just seeking to define what "violence" encapsulates. In this case your chosen definition from Cambridge probably isn't great. Though it's in a dictionary, we can always change the definitions of words if we like, it happens all the time. Cambridge describes our language, not defines it.
As to your final sentence I'm not sure the relevancy, nobody ever brought up suffering and its relation to violence, so far as I can tell.
Hmm, this is an excerpt from my previous comment: "you'll note that what firefighters might do is not intended to cause damage while vandalism obviously is". You do also seem not to understand the meaning of "intent"...
Anyway, this is obviously useless, and in a way illustrates the issue when trying to tackle extremism, which is that it is outside the bounds of logic and reason, so bye.
Because if that's the case, then vandals also dream of a platonic city that doesn't require statements to be made through thrown rocks in order to achieve systemic justice.
> Anyway, this is obviously useless, and in a way illustrates the issue when trying to tackle extremism, which is that it is outside the bounds of logic and reason, so bye
It saddens me that when you find someone you disagree with, you assume they're simply irrational lunatics and thus not worth paying attention to.