Roger,
The problem is that AntiFa doesn't just use violence to defend themselves when
attacked. They have a theory that the very existence of White Nationalist
street demonstrations is an attack on all of us so they physically attack
first. They also destroy physical property as a disruptive tactic to show their
antipathy to the current financial system. If you turn their theory of attack
around, that would give the Right Wing the right to attack any demonstration
by Leftists because the Right perceives Leftist demonstrations as an attack on
them.
From a pragmatic viewpoint, in America, violent demonstrations frighten people
and they'll turn to the militarized police and government authority for
protection. If you want them to join a movement to change our political system,
using violence is a sure way to discourage them from joining.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey ;
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2017 3:29 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
Cc: jamesjarvis98 <jamesjarvis98@xxxxxxxxx>; Matthew <mcblack@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Only Nonviolent Resistance Will Destroy
Corporate State
The reason violence begets violence is that when people are attacked they have
the right to defend themselves and they do defend themselves as well as they
can. If you renounce violence at all times and in any circumstances you are
just setting yourselves up to be smashed.
On 10/21/2017 2:21 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Absolutely correct!
Any time we resort to the tactics of the Corporate State, we lose.
Remember the hard and fast rule: Violence begets violence.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/20/17,
comes the following message: > Only Nonviolent Resistance Will Destroy
Corporate State
By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
October 19th, 2017
Above Photo: The Oceti Sakowin camp, near the Standing Rock
reservation in North Dakota, in November 2016. (Becker1999 / Flickr)
The encampments by Native Americans at Standing Rock, N.D., from
April 2016 to February 2017 to block construction of the Dakota
Access pipeline provided the template for future resistance
movements. The action was nonviolent. It was sustained. It was highly
organized. It was grounded in spiritual, intellectual and communal
traditions. And it lit the conscience of the nation.
Native American communities-more than 200 were represented at the
Standing Rock encampments, which at times contained up to 10,000
people-called themselves "water protectors." Day after day, week
after week, month after month, the demonstrators endured assaults
carried out with armored personnel carriers, rubber bullets, stun
guns, tear gas, cannons that shot water laced with chemicals, and
sound cannons that can cause permanent hearing loss.
Drones hovered overhead. Attack dogs were unleashed on the crowds.
Hundreds were arrested, roughed up and held in dank, overcrowded
cells. Many were charged with felonies. The press, or at least the
press that attempted to report honestly, was harassed and censored,
and often reporters were detained or arrested. And mixed in with the
water protectors was a small army of infiltrators, spies and agents
provocateurs, who often initiated vandalism and rock throwing at law
enforcement and singled out anti-pipeline leaders for arrest.
The Democratic administration of Barack Obama did not oppose the
pipeline until after the election of Donald Trump, who approved the
project in January 2017 soon after he became president. The water
protectors failed in their ultimate aim to stop the construction, but
if one looks at their stand as a single battle in a long war,
Standing Rock was vitally important because it showed us how to
resist.
In November of last year I spoke with Kandi Mossett, one of the water
protector leaders, when I visited the North Dakota encampments. We
were standing over one of the sacred fires.
"He starts throwing rocks at police," she said of an infiltrator who
shadowed her and pointed her out to law enforcement for arrest. "When
he throws rocks I see a few other people throw water bottles. One of
our women says, 'Stop throwing shit!' So people stop. But there's
instigators and infiltrators. We've had, here at this fire, two women
who were called bikers because of the way they were dressed. When
they lifted up their hands with everybody, people saw they had wires
on. [Water protector] security went to them. They said, 'We see that
you're miked.' They took off running. Went over the fence. And a car
came zooming, picked them up, and they took off.
It's not easy to keep [infiltrators] out. They can roll under the fence.
They can come from under the security gates. We know they're here."
The corporate state, no longer able to peddle a credible ideology, is
becoming more overtly totalitarian. It will increasingly silence
dissidents out of fear that the truth they speak will spark a
contagion. It will, as in China's system of totalitarian capitalism,
use the tools of censorship, blacklisting, infiltration,
blackmailing, bribery, public defamation, prison sentences on
trumped-up charges and violence. The more discredited the state
becomes, the more it will communicate in the language of force.
"This world is heading towards economic systems that continue to eat
up life itself, even the heart of workers, and it's not sustainable,"
Native American and environmental leader Tom B.K. Goldtooth told me
when we spoke at one of the camps last year. "We're at that point
where Mother Earth is crying out for a revolution. Mother Earth is
crying out for a new direction."
"As far as a new regime, we'll need something based on earth
jurisprudence,"
he said. "A new system away from property rights, away from
privatization, away from financialization of nature, away from
control over our . DNA, away from control over seeds, away from
corporations. It's a common law with local sovereignty. That's why
it's important we have a system that recognizes the rights of a
healthy and clean water system, ecosystem.
Mother
Earth has rights. We need a system that will recognize that. Mother
Earth is not an object. We have an economic system that treats Mother
Earth as if she's a liquidation issue. We have to change that. That's
not sustainable."
"If the pipeline is built, is that a defeat?" I asked him. He replied
wryly, "That oil is going to run dry a lot sooner than they think.
Maybe that corporation is going to go bankrupt. Who knows?"
"I talk about the need for young people to have patience, to put the
prayer first, rather than just jumping out there and putting their
energy into action," he said. Angry reaction is "what the
corporations want. That's what the government wants. They want us to
react. They want us to feel that anger. When the anger escalates, our
feelings, frustrations, it goes back to that rage. The rage of the
machines. It's also unhappy. It feeds off the unhappiness of people."
George Lakey, the Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues in
Social Change emeritus at Swarthmore College and a sociologist who
focuses on nonviolent social change, talked about Sweden and Norway's
response in the
1920 and '30s to the rise of fascism and compared it with the
response in Italy and Germany. We live in a historical moment similar
to when fascism was ascendant between the two world wars, he argues.
Lakey was a trainer during the civil rights movement for Mississippi
Freedom Summer and co-authored "A Manual for Direct Action: Strategy
and Tactics for Civil Rights and All Other Nonviolent Protest
Movements," one of the seminal texts of the civil rights movement.
"Fascism was a definite threat," he said of the situation faced by
Sweden and Norway. "And they were also experiencing [economic] depression.
Norway's
degree of depression was even worse than Germany's. It was the worst
in Europe. The highest unemployment in Europe. People were literally
starving.
The pressure, the pro-fascist setup that the depression brings, was
very present both in Sweden and in Norway. What the Nazis did
there-what they did in Germany and what the fascists did in Italy-was
provocation, provocation, provocation. 'Bait the left. The left will
come. And we'll have street fighting.' "
Street violence, he said in echoing Native American elders, always
"strengthens the state."
"It puts more pressure on the state-which is presided over by the 1
percent-to step in more and more forcefully, with the middle class
saying, 'We care about order. We don't want chaos,' " he said.
"That's what happened in Germany. It was a strengthening of the
state. This happened in Italy as well. That's what the game plan was
for fascists in Norway and Sweden. It didn't work. It didn't work
because the left didn't play their game. They didn't allow themselves
to be baited into paying attention to them, doing street fighting."
"Instead, [what was done] in the civil rights movement we would have
called 'they kept their eyes on the prize,' " Lakey said. "They knew
the prize was to push away the economic elite, get rid of its
dominance, so they can set up a new economic system, which is now
called the Nordic model. What they did was: massive strikes, massive
boycotts, massive demonstrations. Not only in the urban areas, which
is what you expect, but also in the rural areas.
During the Depression [in Sweden and Norway], there were lots of
farmers who had their farms foreclosed on. Farmers are perennially in
debt and had no way of repaying that debt. When the sheriff came,
farmers in that county would come to join them and collectively not
cooperate-not violently, but very strongly-in such a way that the
sheriff couldn't carry out the auction."
"Remember who is actually running things, and we keep our focus on
them both politically and economically," Lakey said.
"The group I'm involved with [Earth Quaker Action Team] loves to go
after corporations," he said. "We went after a bank [PNC], the
seventh largest bank in the country but it was the No. 1 financier of
mountaintop-removal coal mining in Appalachia. We forced that bank
out of [the] business of financing mountaintop coal mining.
Nonviolently. Disrupting. Disrupting. We were in bank branches all
over the place. We shut down two shareholder meetings. We led a
boycott in which people took out money from that bank and were
putting it in their local credit unions. So there's more than one way
to go after the 1 percent."
"These days, a very smart way to do that is to focus on the economic
entities that are owned by the 1 percent, who are basically
responsible for the oppression that we experience," he said.
Resistance, he stressed, will come from outside the formal political
system.
It will not be embraced by either of the two main political parties
or the establishment, which is now under corporate control.
"The Democratic Party is out to lunch," he said. "The Republican
Party is actively grinding us. But even so we can make tremendous
strides and start building that mass movement, which in Norway and
Sweden was able to push the economic elites away. So that's an
indication of the way to build a movement-which is not to take them
on the way antifa suggests. Instead, in the way the civil rights
movement did. It worked. I was there. The Ku Klux Klan was much
stronger then than it is now. In the Deep South, the Ku Klux Klan
virtually ran the [region]."
Resistance, he said, means movements have to keep "pushing, pushing,
pushing. Campaign after campaign after campaign." It must always stay
"on the offensive. That's the secret."
"As soon as they lost that sense of going on the offensive, choosing
campaign after campaign and winning those campaigns, that was when
they lost their momentum," he said of the civil rights movement. "The
important thing about what happened in Norway and Sweden was they
kept their momentum. The campaigns continued to grow in number and in
power until the economic elite was out."
"I was very influenced by Bayard Rustin, who was the chief strategist
for Dr. [Martin Luther] King," he said. "I heard Bayard say over and
over and over, 'If we don't get this economic justice thing done, in
50 years we're still going to have rampant racism.' He was right. But
Dr. King and the other leaders who understood that were not able to
get a sufficient number of people to make it. Now, the '63 march was
for jobs and justice. So they were able to do it to some degree. They
kept moving in that direction, involving white trade unions in that
process. But in the situation of general prosperity, there were many
people who were content with our economic system."
Economic decline, deindustrialization, austerity, debt peonage, decay
and collapse of social services and infrastructure and the
impoverishment of the working class, Lakey said, have changed the
configuration. The working class, in short, can no longer be bought
off.
"We're in a very different situation," he said. "We're still in austerity.
There's not the degree of [contentment] that there once was. Trump
has obviously capitalized on that fact. There's discontent. I think what Dr.
King and Bayard and others wanted to happen in the '60s is now realizable."
"The impact of ignoring climate change is going to be more and more
disastrous," he added. "We're just through it now with [a devastating
hurricane in] Houston. We're going to see more and more money drained
off by that [kind of natural disaster]. Again, the 1 percent won't
want to pay their fair share. What that leaves us is a population
that is more and more discontent. We see that polarization going on.
Polarization always goes along with increased inequality. We can
expect more polarization. That's a part of the temptation of antifa:
'I'm more and more upset.' "
"When dealing with mountaintop-removal coal mining, we went from an
organization [Earth Quaker Action Team] that started in a living room
to 13 states," he said. "We were steadfastly nonviolent. And we were
targeting something people understood. 'Wow, you're going after the
bank that's financing this? I want to join that.' Even though there
were some people who were like, 'We'd like a little more politeness,
please.' They didn't get it because what we were about was making the
bank's life so difficult that they would choose instead to get out of
the business [of mountaintop mining]."
Lakey cautioned against diverting energy to attacking neo-Nazi and
white supremacist groups. That, he said, is a gift to the state.
"There's really no need for us to shift our attention from going
after the
1
percent to go after, often, working-class guys on the extreme right,"
he said. "For one thing, we look at their real, genuine grievances
and address them. For example, how many people on the right are from
working-class families who have family members who are not being
served by our health care system? Many people on the far right are
from a demographic that is actually losing life expectancy for the
first time in U.S. history. The health care system in the U.S is a
mess. Obamacare is better than previous, but it's a mess. So what we
can do is address the genuine grievances instead of writing people
off as if obsession with racism is all that's going on. Fascism grows
when the economy declines. So let's address the real thing instead of
the symptom."
While refusing to be baited into violent confrontations with the
radical right, we must also be vigorous in using militant, nonviolent
tactics to block hate speech. Article 4 of the International Covenant
on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted by
the United Nations in 1965, stipulates that "all propaganda and all
organizations"
based on ideas or theories of racial or ethnic superiority should be
illegal. It urges states to take positive steps to eliminate them.
Dr. Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese of Popular Resistance dealt with
the issue of hate speech recently when a Baltimore chapter of the
League of Women Voters held a series of panel discussions on
immigration. The chapter invited speakers from anti-immigrant white
supremacist groups listed as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law
Center. Despite public outcry, the league refused to withdraw the
invitations. At the initial event the speaker was prevented from
completing his presentation by anti-racist activists and members of
the local chapter of the Green Party.
"Organizations and institutions do not have a requirement to include
those who espouse hate," Flowers and Zeese wrote of the event. "They
are not required to give a platform to or legitimize white
supremacist views. In fact, one could argue that it is anti-social to do so."
"We would do better as a society to debate the best ways to eliminate
white supremacy," they added.
Lakey's prescription: "Consistently occupy the moral high ground, and
that attracts support." "It defangs those who want to do us in," he
said. "It's not like the 1 percent was fond of the civil rights
movement. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming into making
concessions. J. Edgar Hoover was even quoted as saying, 'He's [King]
the most dangerous man in America.' "
And, Lakey said, "there's a psychological reward. Going for what you
want, instead of opposing what you don't want, is itself fulfilling.
It was civil rights. It was called the Freedom Movement. It's also
called a black liberation movement. It was all about positivity."
