{"id":11360,"date":"2012-03-10T17:27:33","date_gmt":"2012-03-10T22:27:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theredphoenixapl.org\/?p=11360"},"modified":"2012-03-10T17:27:33","modified_gmt":"2012-03-10T22:27:33","slug":"should-occupy-use-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/2012\/03\/should-occupy-use-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"Should Occupy Use Violence?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I Dunno, Should the Cops?<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

by KEVIN CARSON<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Back in the mid-1980s, when the African National Congress was still fighting the South Africa\u2019s apartheid regime, I recall Secretary of State George Schultz testifying before some Senate committee. He clutched his pearls at the appearance that \u201csome members of this body are speaking in favor of violence.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Even then, when I wasn\u2019t an anarchist or anything approaching it, I laughed myself silly. Just what, exactly, did he imagine those American troops were doing in Grenada? \u201cWe\u2019re here from the Western Hemisphere Ladies Auxiliary, and here\u2019s a fruit basket with some coupons for discounts at local merchants?\u201d For that matter, what did he think those guys with the flintlocks were doing on Lexington Green?<\/span><\/p>\n

In the official narrative, the question always concerns whether anyone and everyone but the state should engage in violence. The question of whether the state should engage in violence, or whether state violence should be evaluated in terms of the same standards of reasonableness as violence by nonstate actors, never crosses the threshold of visibility. The legitimacy of violence by the state is never even articulated as an issue.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s a shame. The state is not a mystical entity, a sum greater than the human beings making it up. The state is simply a group of human beings cooperating for common purposes \u2014 purposes frequently at odds with those of other groups of people, like the majority of people in the same society. And violent actions by an association of individuals who call themselves \u201cthe state\u201d have no more automatic legitimacy than violent actions by associations of individuals who call themselves \u201cthe Ku Klux Klan\u201d or \u201cal Qaeda.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The violent actions of the state deserve to be evaluated using the same criteria by which we judge the morality of the violent actions of any other grouping of individuals. Alexander Berkman, in \u201cThe ABC of Anarchism,\u201d argued that the death and destruction caused by the institutionalized violence of the state was many times greater than that caused by anarchists or other revolutionaries. Who do you think has thrown more bombs \u2014 anarchists, or government military forces?<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite all the mystification of \u201cnational security\u201d and \u201cnational interest,\u201d the interests served by the state\u2019s military violence are every bit as particular as those served by any other violent actions carried out by other groups of individuals. The state is nothing but an association for armed violence on the part of those who make money at the expense of other people. As Howard Zinn said:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that \u2014 not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor \u2014 is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So it is with all the hand-wringing over \u201cviolence\u201d in recent confrontations between Occupy Portland and the Portland police.<\/span><\/p>\n

Andy Robinson, a professor at Cambridge who specializes among other things in networked resistance movements, argues that there\u2019s a very pernicious framing going on in news coverage of the issue. \u201cThere\u2019s no mention of the fact that police have repeatedly, violently attacked Occupy protests which consisted simply of sit-downs and camp-outs. \u2026 The fact that police use violence routinely and with impunity is not mentioned. In fact, police violence as such (as opposed to excessive brutality) is treated as uncontroversial. \u2026 Protective moves such as using shields and face coverings are portrayed as proactively aggressive.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Or as anarchist Occupy activist David Graeber says in response to Chris Hedges\u2019 recent clueless attack, \u201cthe US media is simply constitutionally incapable of reporting acts of police repression as \u2018violence.\u2019 If the police decide to attack a group of protesters, they will claim to have been provoked, and the media will repeat whatever the police say \u2026 as the basic initial facts of what happened. This will happen whether or not anyone at the protest does anything that can be remotely described as violence.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

We saw Oakland mayor Jean Quan, with a straight face, quacking about protestors alleged to have violently invaded a YMCA building, when in fact they were desperately trying to escape through the building after police had \u201ckettled\u201d them and begun the wholesale use of chemical weapons upon them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Such official lies by politicians and cops, Robinson argues, are a \u201cpsyop designed to conceal their own repeated use of violence. \u2026 People are quoted as being against \u2018all violence\u2019 without the implications for police violence being examined. It\u2019s basically a double standard \u2014 we never see it questioned whether supporters of the status quo have a right to use violence (only whether the violence they use is excessive) \u2026 a bit like starting a debate, \u2018should an invaded country use violence against the invaders,\u2019 without mentioning the violence of the invaders or the act of invasion.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This last comparison is telling, given the farcical entertainment we get every night on CNN. Iran, a country ringed by military bases garrisoned by a global superpower that spends nearly as much on its military forces as all the other countries in the world combined, constitutes a military \u201cthreat\u201d to the country which is besieging it. And the beseiging country, which has military bases in half the countries of the world and has overthrown more governments than any previous empire in human history, is \u201cdefending itself.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, if you look at the American \u201cDefense\u201d Department\u2019s planning documents, the main \u201cthreat\u201d presented by Iran is the horrifying possibility that it might be able to successfully defend itself against an American attack. Which attack, of course, would be entirely justified by the \u201caggressive\u201d act of defying a direct order by the U.S. (or its UN Security Council proxy).<\/span><\/p>\n

In this Orwellian conceptual world, the question of whether the state has the right to use violence doesn\u2019t bear looking into. But in the real world, it does. The state is by far the greatest concentration of organized violence, and it almost always employs such violence for evil purposes \u2014 whether at Tahrir Square, Hama, or Oakland.<\/span><\/p>\n

So if you\u2019re arguing over whether Occupy should \u201cuse violence,\u201d you\u2019re asking the wrong question.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fuente<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I Dunno, Should the Cops? by KEVIN CARSON Back in the mid-1980s, when the African National Congress was still fighting the South Africa\u2019s apartheid regime,..<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38768,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[149,152,166,18,181,43,185,97],"tags":[350,347,351],"class_list":["post-11360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-discrimination","category-economy","category-government","category-history","category-labor","category-media-culture","category-prisons","category-us-news","tag-united-states-history","tag-workers-struggle","tag-world-history"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redphoenix.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Berkeley-Occupy-violence-2_11360_b6d8d.jpg?fit=625%2C446&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11360\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}