First of Matthew's two-part examination of why the hell questions of force, non-violent resistance with and without force, unarmed violence and property damage, and armed violence are so incredibly hard to talk about in a culture thick with spiritual and political bypassing. Are we capable of understanding the difference between morality and strategy?
Part 1 focuses on philosophy and psychology while Part 2 focuses on definitions and tactics. Together, both parts will push back on conspiracism about the identities, motives, and methods of antifascists. Both will present slices of the rich discourse on violence and non-violence from antifascist history, including clarifying definitions of key terms. Both will open a space to think carefully about what intensities of self and community defense are both useful and tolerable in the fight against fascism.
Part 2 gets into the very thick weeds of how the “strategic nonviolence” research of Gene Sharp, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan is framed as empirical, but may be way more about idealizing Gandhi than about facts on the ground. Drops Monday on Patreon.
Huge list of references for each!
Show Notes
Stopping the Press: The Threats to the Media Posed by the Second Trump Term | The New Yorker
What the FBI Has Done, and Kash Patel Could Do - Columbia Journalism Review
Hakeem Jeffries cracks down on Trump speech disruptions
Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer Got Punched—You Can Thank the Black Bloc | The Nation
Aamer Rahman: Is it really ok to punch nazis?
$16.5M settlement reached in class-action lawsuit over mass arrests during 2010 G20 summit | CBC News
Meditations at the ringed fence around G20 Toronto - rabble.ca
Remaining Human: A Buddhist Perspective on Occupy Wall Street - Michael Stone
Brief: The Outside Agitator Conspiracy Trope (w/Dr. Peniel Joseph) — Conspirituality
Anti-fascists linked to zero murders in the US in 25 years | Donald Trump | The Guardian
40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Sunshine
rules for radicals | saul d. alinsky
198 METHODS OF NONVIOLENT ACTION | — Gene Sharp
She Interrupted a Town-Hall Meeting and Was Dragged Out by Private Security - The New York Times
Martin Luther King Jr. had a much more radical message than a dream of racial brotherhood
The Enigma of Frantz Fanon | The Nation
Frantz Fanon and the struggle against colonisation | MR Online
Frantz Fanon and the Paradox of Anticolonial Violence – Solidarity
Frantz Fanon—a vital defence of violence by the oppressed - Socialist Worker
Land and Freedom (1995 Ken Loach) [ENG Sub] (starting at the collectivization debate scene)
Full Spectrum Resistance — McBay
The Failure of Nonviolence | The Anarchist Library
Beyond Violence and Nonviolence | ROAR Magazine
Debunking the myths around nonviolent resistance | ROAR Magazine
Social movements and the (mis)use of research: Extinction Rebellion and the 3.5% rule
Responding to Domestic Terrorism: A Crisis of Legitimacy - Harvard Law Review
Domestic Terrorism: Definitions, Terminology, and Methodology — FBI
676 | United States Sentencing Commission
Activists use 'Tesla Takedown' protests to fight job cuts by Musk and Trump | Reuters
Tesla vehicles destroyed, vandalized since Musk began role at White House, authorities say - ABC News
Anti-DOGE protests at Tesla stores target Elon Musk's bottom line | AP News
Tyre Extinguishers: A Night Out with the Climate Activists Sabotaging SUVs
Leaflet | Tyre Extinguishers
Tesla Stocks Tumble as Elon Musk’s Political Role Grows More Divisive - The New York Times
Internal Memos: Senior USAID Leaders Warned Trump Appointees of Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths From Closing Agency
Beyond Violence and Nonviolence | ROAR Magazine
Violence Will Only Hurt the Trump Resistance | The New Republic
Why Not Riot? Interview with Author Ben Case - CounterPunch.org
10 Lessons on Filmmaking from Director Ken Loach
BBC Taster - How to Make a Ken Loach Film
Land and Freedom (1995 Ken Loach) [ENG Sub]
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster.
If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep Podcast.
I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.
Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention.
And then your mind lets you drift off.
Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
if you can believe that.
Brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride of wildly diverse topics from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon to riveting conversations with a bona fide rocket scientist.
You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high spirit.
So this is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Felber, who is great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
You may recognize them from that.
Wait, wait, don't tell me.
And they bring the same acerbic yet infectiously funny energy to Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.
When I was on, they grilled me in an absolutely unique way.
about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon and we had a great time.
They were very sincerely interested in the topic but they still found plenty of hilarious angles in terms of the questions they asked and how they followed up on whatever I gave them like good comedians do.
Check out their show.
There are other recent episodes you might find interesting as well like hearing crazy Hollywood stories from legendary casting director Joel Thurm or their episode about killer whales and killer theme songs.
So Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone is an absolute riot you don't want to miss.
Find Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Hello, everybody.
This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
In other words, your daily news feed.
You can follow myself, Derek, and Julian on Blue Sky.
And we're still on Twitter as it circles the drain.
The pod is on Instagram and threads under its own handle.
And please support our Patreon and the Patreons of all the independent media outlets you value and can afford to support.
I think this is really the time to do it because state repression is just getting going.
FBI Director Cash Patel has openly vowed to target journalists.
The DHS just blackvanned pro-Palestinian protest organizer and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil right out of a Columbia campus residence building to Louisiana, away from being able to meet with legal counsel.
And Columbia hasn't lifted a finger to protect him.
And as I'm writing, Trump is sounding off about classifying the vandalism of Teslas as domestic terrorism.
Which can land the convicted sentences of up to 50 years in prison.
So as they say, it's going down.
Okay, I'm going to start with a clip which isn't ideal for podcasting because there's a lot of visual humor in it.
We're just going to see if you know what this guy is talking about anyway.
This is Instagram comedian at P. Vanny or Peyton Vanist.
You're not going to be able to see it, but during these long beats, he's mugging into the selfie.
He's raising his eyebrows, smirking.
He's kind of giving the game away.
He's sitting on his couch just thinking about who knows.
He's not saying, but he's hinting at something.
Something very bad.
Maybe punching a Nazi.
Maybe something a little more.
You know, illegal, unless you get away with it.
I'm not saying somebody should.
That's not what I'm saying.
I'm not saying anyone should.
No, no.
No, I'm not.
Couldn't be me.
You know what I mean?
But if someone was going...
I'm kidding.
Don't.
I'm completely joking.
Nobody should.
Nobody should.
You shouldn't.
I shouldn't.
Nobody should.
Nobody should.
That's all I've got to say.
That's all I have to say.
Just nobody, nobody should.
And I've said that no one should.
Very publicly right now, actually.
I've said that nobody should.
Nobody should because nobody's going to.
Because nobody should.
It got 5 million views in the first 5 days.
And this isn't a huge account.
And I think it's funny and uncomfortable and viral because it's poking at a bunch of swollen, hanging, taboo questions and private thoughts like, how far would I go in self-defense or to secure justice in an oppressive system?
Because the question of the role of disobedience, force, sabotage, property damage during demonstrations, and violent resistance In terms of morality and strategy and effectiveness, is on a lot of people's minds right now.
Maybe it never cleared, like the smoke over the George Floyd protests.
It came to the fore around militarized crackdowns on the pro-Palestinian encampment protesters, and it burned bright in the wake of the assassination of Brian Thompson, allegedly by Luigi Mangione.
Today, it's also showing up in the, we're gonna need a bigger Luigi jokes.
So in this long shadow, Peyton is taking the piss out of the piety that the commitment to civility demands we maintain, no matter what's going down around us.
The piety that freezes people in their seats as Dr. Therese Borenfall is dragged out of a Coeur d'Alene town hall by unidentified thugs.
The piety that expects us all to watch all but one congressional Democrat watch Trump give a straight-up fascist speech.
And how piety turns to appeasement when the White House calls Representative Al Green's shouting protest at the speech, quote, the most disgraceful moment in the history of presidential addresses.
And 10 of his Democrat colleagues agree by joining the GOP to vote for his censure.
So Peyton is saying almost nothing in this gag, and yet the top-rated comment on that Instagram reel is, how on God's great earth did I know exactly what you were saying?
And that's currently at over 100,000 likes.
So today's brief is the first of a two-part study, and it's called Anti-Fascist Woodshed No.
2 Punching Nazis?
And it focuses on how many people know exactly what Peyton's saying.
But may not have the tools to really evaluate feelings of rage and thoughts of resistance, whether they're violent or otherwise, and how they might make sense, and how when we think about violence and nonviolence, we can separate moral arguments from strategic arguments, but only when we actually define the terms.
Now, part two, and I had to break this up because there's a lot here, will drop on Patreon on Monday.
So that's in two days.
So I'm following up on the first Woodshed installment on February 22nd, which reviewed some key books on anti-fascist history, action, and advice.
At the top of that episode, I said I'd be continuing the series with more diverse sources and topics, all in the hope of providing some regular breath and reflection space in parallel to the shitstorm of our news feeds.
The premise of this short series, not sure how long it'll be, is that, yes, we've entered a fascist era, but we're not alone in this experience.
Many have gone before us, and that means we can be shocked but not unprepared as the veneer of liberal democracy is peeled away to reveal the raw power relations that now run our politics mask off.
The beating heart of that power is violence.
And so I wanted to address the question of how anti-fascists understand and respond to violence in the street and in the structures around them, and why even the most symbolic and non-military gestures like single punches of Nazis in their faces have become distracting subjects of moral hand-wringing.
So this two-parter will do a few things.
It'll dispel some conspiratorial type thinking about the identities and methods of antifascists.
It'll present a slice of the rich discourse on violence and nonviolence from antifascist history, including some clarifying definitions of key terms.
But also, I just want to put it out there that in the weeks and years to come, I think everyone is going to have to think carefully about what intensities of self and community defense are both useful and tolerable in the fight against fascism.
And I'm not just talking about the risk of facing off against Patriot Front in the street or getting arrested at a Tesla dealership because not everyone can do that.
Not everybody wants to do that.
That's not right for everyone.
I'm also talking about the decisions we make about who we are going to support and how.
In these episodes, I'll be citing and linking to thoughts from Natasha Leonard, Mark Bray, Michael Stone, Kwame Touré, France Fanon, Jean Améry, Eric McBey, Ken Loach, and Ben Case's work on the false binary between violent and nonviolent protest and Ben Case's work on the false binary between violent and nonviolent protest and the problems with the research of Gene Sharp, Erica Chenoweth, So this won't be like the previous tour through six texts, which was pretty straightforward.
Like, this is what I think of these three books, these six books, rather.
I have to take this theme by theme instead.
And the spoiler...
Is that there are no easy answers.
Down to the fact that when people say the word violence, they usually aren't defining the term, even to themselves.
Anti-fascists have to cut through that clearly, but it doesn't happen without disagreement.
So we have a lot of thoughtful and passionate people thinking and arguing and working things out with a shared conviction that fascism is intolerable and must be stopped.
Now, breaking up the themes into the two parts, today's part will focus more on the background philosophical and psychological issues at play in nonviolence discourse.
And then the second part will zero in on how antifascists debate over definitions and tactics.
So on this philosophy and psychology note, we should ask or we could ask, why is this a conspirituality topic?
So, long-time listeners, hello out there.
Thank you so much.
You will know that we have always looked at the ways in which spirituality and wellness run cover and provide blessing for movements ranging from the reactionary to the fascists.
We have covered New Agers leafing through A Course in Miracles and the Tarot for evidence that Donald Trump is a lightworker.
We've seen their evil QAnon twins pour through the garbage heaps of social media for signs of a divine, wrathful apocalypse.
Maha Mamas say that sound vibrations work better than vaccines and don't contain all the poisons.
Tradcasts say that tradwifery will bring the hormones of the universe back into balance.
And the biohacking bros, they scarf down rotting raw chicken and they share on Instagram that their chronic diarrhea is a cleansing practice.
It's a lot of displacements and cover-ups.
It's a lot of lipstick on a lot of pigs.
But a key analytical framework we've used along the way to understand these contradictions is from psychologist John Wellwood and his concept of spiritual bypassing.
Which is the usage of spiritual ideology to prematurely and superficially resolve conflicts.
So, this is the practice of using spirituality to withdraw from material conditions and responsibilities.
And it might look like pro-Trump evangelical farmers swaying in prayer as they hope that the cuts in USAID don't really go through.
In left-ish spaces, it looks like people doing excessive amounts of yoga in the fervent belief that their inner peace will somehow be the change they want to see in the world.
I'll come back to that.
Now, previously, I've coined a version of this that I call political bypassing.
And it can have a deep faith-based root in the need to maintain a genteel or noble self-perception.
And I think it will do whatever it can to bolster the belief that, for instance, liberal democracy is thriving, that capitalism can function well, that the green economy is on track to save us all, that fascism is an aberrant psychopathology and not the logical outcome of capitalism, and that American exceptionalism is reasonable.
Deep down, the political bypasser believes that we are a moral and good people.
They get rolled by the Harris campaign stumping on the theme of joy while sending billions of dollars in munitions to support a genocide.
The political bypass project protests too much, saying we are not a violent society.
We are not a violent society.
But anti-fascists have always known this has never been true.
They hold embodied memories of what it means to fight corporate and state repression, from the shootouts of the West Virginia coal wars and street battles in 1910 general strike times in Philadelphia, through to 1936 and the Battle of Cable Street and the international brigades through to 1936 and the Battle of Cable Street and the international brigades joining up in Spain to fight Franco, to the and more recently, the assassination of Fred Hampton.
The massacre at Kent State, the anti-globalization protests of the 90s, the battle in Seattle, and into the Trump era, getting kettled on the J-20 inauguration in 2021, and then last spring's militarized response under the Biden administration to pro-Palestinian protesters.
They would argue that not remembering or being honest about this violent history is an obstacle to understanding...
But there's another influence that isn't about naive denial or reactionary politics, but it does confuse the reality of power dynamics from inside the house of the left.
And this is how...
The non-violent imperative takes inspiration from Gandhi's tactics in the battle for Indian independence and the way those tactics have been framed and understood not only politically but culturally through yoga and wellness and other countercultures.
We can hear it in influences as diverse as Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh, and even Marianne Williamson's appeal for the founding of a federal department of peace.
How many yoga classes have you been in where the teacher reads a Gandhi quote to you while you're in corpse pose at the end?
Be the change you want to see in the world has become a mantra of prefigurative politics, expressing the wish that by maintaining an inner core of peace and equanimity, you will somehow encourage the cops to put down their batons and shields.
It skips over the point of confrontation, and it jumps directly to the desire for it to be all worked out in the end.
Now, my late friend, the Buddhism and yoga teacher Michael Stone, really leaned into this contradiction and desired outcome.
I'm going to post a link to an article he wrote back in the fall of 2010. This is 15 years ago now.
It was months after the previous summer's The vast majority were people who had just been marching and chanting against the hyper-capitalist exploitation of
expanding free trade zones.
Most of them were released with no charges.
But ten years later, the police settled a lawsuit with the protesters that they had brutalized, paying out $16 million.
Now, Michael showed up at those protests with his meditation group, but he kept a safe distance.
This was fair.
He had his six-year-old with him, and members of his group, they sat down to meditate in a line, in full view of the street battle.
He also had his people take very compelling photos of the scene, which went up on his website to help spread the word that his group had a commitment to the beauty of nonviolence, which he wrote in this article, Our humanness has everything
to do with how we care for others.
Our sphere of awareness begins to include everything and everyone.
The way we respond to our circumstances shows our commitment to non-harm.
So Michael could always turn a phrase, but things could be a little groundless, as the Buddhists say.
And like so many others, he tracked his values back to Gandhi's term satyagraha, which translates as seizing and holding on to the truth.
It was a metaphysical directive to refuse to stoop to material expressions of aggression, to allow the dignity of one's convictions and the truth to become the only meaningful weapon.
And for Gandhi, it was intensely prefigurative.
He was trying to imagine and will into being and manifest a peaceful future nation.
So Satyagraha is an aspiration that surges through wave after wave of the social movements that follow him.
But according to political scientist Ben Case, whose great book, Street Rebellion, Resistance Beyond Violence and Nonviolence, I highly recommend, and I'll be leaning on it heavily in part two on Monday, this legacy of Satyagraha cashed out in the end to the idea that,
quote, nonviolence is valued over political victory since enacting violence in order to achieve a material goal would not be victory at all.
Now, well below the Indian independence threshold of questions of physical violence and revolutionary conflict, but likely on the way to it, we see the echo of this philosophy, this mood in Democratic Party whips counseling members to be quiet and this mood in Democratic Party whips counseling members to be quiet and dignified at the State of Now, it's clear that everyone is shocked and reeling under the assaults of the Trump administration.
Like, who gets elected and goes to Washington prepared to face the breakdown of the electoral order?
I don't blame the Democrat congresspeople who weren't able to muster more resistance to the address than auctioneer paddles.
I mean, if they're sitting in that chamber, they have trained themselves in compromise over an entire lifetime.
But I'm excluding here Rashida Tlaib and Maxwell Frost and Jasmine Crockett and a few others.
But I do think that this stiff self-perception of propriety and a dignified but naive faith in going high when they go low amounts to appeasement or even defeat being preferable to risk.
And setting aside the question of whether any civil resistance movement is successful solely through dignified nonviolence, is this idealized and self-idealizing posture effective?
This was the question that came out of a famous punch.
To the face of a famous Nazi.
Neo-Nazis don't love me.
They kind of hate me, actually.
NATO's people don't like me, to be honest.
What?
Pepe's become kind of a symbol.
So those are some sounds from January 20th, 2017. That's a black bloc anti-fascist protester punching shitheel Richard Spencer hard on the side of the face.
Now, here's a written summary of that moment, which went viral.
The writing was published in The Nation by anti-fascist theorist Natasha Leonard.
Now, she herself was at that protest in black bloc garb that day.
Puncher might have been her.
We don't know.
That's part of the point.
But she writes, You may have seen it.
It's a meme now, set to backing tracks of Bruce Springsteen, New Order, even a song from Hamilton.
The punch, landed by a masked protester on Inauguration Day, lends itself perfectly to a beat.
Spencer, who states that America belongs to white men, was in the midst of telling an Australian TV crew in D.C. that he was not a neo-Nazi while pointing to his neo-Nazi Pepe the Frog lapel pin.
A black-clad figure then jumps into the frame, deus ex machina, with a perfectly placed right hook to Spencer's face.
The alt-right poster boy stumbles away, and his anonymous attacker bounds out of sight in an instant.
I don't know who threw the punch, but I know by his unofficial uniform that this was a member of our Black Block that day.
And anyone enjoying the Nazi bashing clip, and many are enjoying them, should know that they're watching anti-fascist block tactics par excellence.
Pure kinetic beauty.
If you want to thank Spencer's puncher, thank the Black Block.
Now...
Leonard further explains that kinetic beauty comment, which she got a lot of heat for, as you can imagine, saying that it's about dignity and solidarity and anonymity, that the disguised group that is confronting fascist street thugs sticks together and strikes out when necessary on mutually agreed upon targets and then folds back into itself.
And it reminds me of this.
Our younger kid is a huge Spider-Man 2 video game player.
And when he got the black venom symbiote skin, it has this physics where if he's in a fight with a dozen gangsters, he can activate a strike and a dozen black tendrils will stake out from his spine at lightning speed and sucker punch each one of them before retracting back into his body.
The thugs are like Richard Spencer.
They don't know what hit them.
And the point is, they'll be wary of coming back.
The Black Bloc ideal is to anonymously share the physical and legal burdens of community defense and make it costly for fascists to harass the vulnerable in public spaces.
The anonymity has made it vulnerable to the accusation of outside agitator.
And fascists, of course, want to paint resistance to their territorial claims as coming from the outside.
Foreigners, immigrants, Jews.
They threw this accusation at Martin Luther King Jr. all the time, and last May, I interviewed Dr. Peniel Joseph about how the outside agitator trope was mobilized against every civil rights figure, regardless of where they were from.
But consider the response from Columbia and other universities to their own students' leading protests last spring.
The outside agitator epithet was quickly deployed by the administration and the police.
To justify harsher repression.
Because our students couldn't possibly feel this way about our investments in Israeli arms companies.
And even the kindly Governor Tim Walz, years before, used the trope to delegitimize the Minneapolis protests following the murder of George Floyd.
Now, we don't know who punched Richard Spencer, but there's no reason to believe that Richard Spencer...
Wasn't the only outside agitator who mattered.
And so how did all the upstanding citizens view that punch?
I'll let Bangladeshi Australian comedian Amer Rahman send up the mainstream discourse that followed.
Every white liberal came out of the woodwork going, I don't know, I don't know.
If that's what we should be doing, should we really be applauding someone for punching a Nazi?
Is that how we want to have political conversations?
Shouldn't we hear people out?
If you punch a Nazi, it doesn't make you as bad as one.
You know what we should do with Nazis?
we should debate them, and we should defeat them in the marketplace of ideas.
I don't really know where that is.
I would like to defeat Nazis on planet Earth first.
And then after we eradicate them here, you can fight them in the marketplace of ideas, fucking Narnia, Mordor, whatever.
Whatever imaginary realm it is that you think Nazis can be constructively debated, go for it, right?
Now, before this bit, Rahman points out that the punch came after Spencer had enjoyed profile laundering and political legitimization via a series of mainstream interviews.
Then we have Randy Cohen, the New York Times ethics columnist, who chimes in, and I'm going to quote here from how anti-fascist expert Mark Bray analyzes it.
Quote, he epitomized the tendency to interpret anti-fascist violence as superficially as possible by arguing that the Holocaust occurred, quote, not because people failed to punch Nazis, unquote.
Instead, Cohen advocated following, quote, Gandhi's example or King's example.
Without resorting to the gutter tactics of people like Spencer.
So that's what we call the piety argument, maybe.
But then there's the don't provoke the abuser argument, which basically says that Antifa street actions are dangerous because they can only escalate right-wing violence.
Now, this take commonly omits that right-wing violence is the precondition against which anti-fascists are defending themselves or public space or the vulnerable.
It generally ignores the common knowledge that right-wing violence is always already pervasive and deadly.
A 2020 report examining political violence-related murders in the U.S. going back over 25 years found that right-wing extremists had killed 329 people while only one murder was committed by a self-described anti-fascist.
It's always asymmetrical like this.
Kinetically beautiful or not.
There were definitely problems with the memification of the punch.
Many pointed out that it decontextualized the politics of the moment.
It reduced the moment down to a question of what would Gandhi do?
A consideration of the ethics of the puncher and of the right of Richard Spencer to not get punched.
It instantly trivialized the puncher's motives, their training, their network.
And it didn't take long for punching Nazis to be conflated with the jackass fad of the knockout game.
Now, Mark Bray noted that most journalists at the time who reached out to him for comment only wanted to ask him about punching Nazis and wearing black and broken windows at Starbucks.
So if he wanted to educate anyone on a century of the diversity of anti-fascist philosophy and action, he'd have to sidestep those questions and set his own agenda.
So this trivialization led to three things, at least.
The predictable mainstream piety that nonviolence must overcome our violent tendencies, which pages King and Gandhi to exemplify the peaceful leaders whose purely nonviolent tactics changed the world.
But there are no pure test cases, as we'll see in the second part of this episode on Monday, given that most, if not all, resistance successes are achieved through nonviolent civil disobedience in tandem with a range of actions from armed resistance like guerrilla warfare to unarmed violent resistance as in riots.
But secondly, as Spencer Sunshine points out in their pamphlet, 40 Ways to Fight Fascists, The trivialization led to demonization and had a chilling effect on other tactics.
Later that year, Republican Senator Ted Cruz co-sponsored a bill which sought to label punching Nazis as domestic terrorism.
In response to the May and June 2020 George Floyd protests, President Trump claimed that those who confronted white nationalists were themselves domestic terrorists.
In reality, the vast majority of the work involved in countering the far right is perfectly legal.
However, these condemnations have worked to dissuade people from using the many legal, community-based actions available to fight white nationalists.
Thirdly, turning the punch into a meme for social media does something strange to the embodied gravity of the act.
The Austrian-French philosopher Jean Améry grasped that gravity in his 1966 book called At the Mind's Limits, Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities.
In it, he recounts being tortured by the Gestapo, but having one fleeting moment in which he was able to punch a Nazi in the face.
Quote, is our entire self and our entire fate.
I was my body and nothing else in hunger, in the blows that I suffered, in the blow that I dealt.
My body, debilitated and crusted with filth, was my calamity.
My body, when it tensed to strike, was my physical and metaphysical dignity.
In situations like mine, physical violence is the sole means for restoring a disjointed personality.
Now, Richard Spencer's puncher was not being tortured by the Gestapo.
But we don't know what their trauma history is or whether that punch granted the experience of restoring a disjointed personality.
The virality of the moment suggests that simply watching it happen over and over again on video did restore a sense of balance for a lot of people.
But the spectacle of the punch, fragmented and disembodied by the meme mill, may have provided a certain catharsis while also further muddying a muddied conversation about what violence is.
The hilarity.
Took the focus off the crucial issue of who is allowed to be a body and in which space.
and it took focus away from all of the less dramatic and more generative things that can be done to shove fascism back under its rock.
So why did so many pundits frame a single punch, hitting the face of the leader of a violent movement as a critical matter of incivility and an affront to free speech? hitting the face of the leader of a violent movement The most direct and evergreen anti-fascist answer I've heard comes from Kiwami Touré in his 1969 essay, The Pitfalls of Liberalism.
Now, his context is the question of whether white liberals truly want to participate in the struggle for racial justice and whether they can shed the habit of enabling racists through civility and appeasement for the ultimate purpose of maintaining the status quo in which they enjoy uninterrupted economic comfort.
So really, he's in the zone of the theme I touched on this past Thursday when I pointed to the historical failures of centrist journalists in reporting on the rise of fascism in the early 20th century.
And to clarify his use of liberal here, he's not talking about liberals as leftists, as muddied up by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, but rather the middle-of-the-road believer in the American project of reasonable capitalism who believes that human rights can be reconciled with a system set up to produce wealth inequality and that we can work our differences out in the marketplace of ideas.
Touré, then known as Stokely Carmichael, Was often more radical in his rhetoric than other famous civil rights activists, than MLK Jr., for example.
So both then and now his voice and similar voices are somewhat marginal.
Now, he wasn't as blunt as his successor at SNCC, H. Rapp Brown, who would say things like, America is as violent as cherry pie.
So Touré and King butted heads over tactics, but they grew to be friends and mutual admirers.
And they shared the view, especially later on in King's life, that the white liberal prioritized law and order over justice and was in fact a greater enemy to racial equality than the overt racist, because you can't tell where they stand or if they're ever going to sacrifice any of their personal comfort for the sake of collective justice.
Now, here's how Touré's mentor, Malcolm X, famously put it.
Being friendly and being a friend, I think, are two different things.
I think there are many whites who act friendly toward Negroes.
A fox acts friendly toward the lamb.
And usually the fox is the one who ends up with the lamb chop on his plate.
The wolf doesn't act friendly, and therefore the wolf has more difficulty in getting the lamb chopped in his plate.
I'd like to point out, though, that...
I say that because it is usually, if you study the structure of the Negro community, economically, politically, civically, Psychologically and otherwise, it's controlled by the white liberal, who usually poses as the friend of the Negro, who actually differs from the white conservative in the same way that the fox differs from the wolf.
Their appetite is the same.
Their motives are the same.
It's only their mannerisms and methods that differ.
Toure pinpoints an adjacent issue.
Now, he says, I think the biggest problem with the white liberal in America, and perhaps the liberal around the world, is that his primary task is to stop confrontation, to stop conflicts, not to redress grievances, but to stop confrontation.
Now, I want to be clear here that in the passage that follows, Toure is mainly talking about maximal violence, referring to the bloody realities of imperialism and occupation, the Vietnam War, and the questions of armed resistance that the Black Power Movement was litigating at the time that he's writing this.
In the follow-up episode on Monday, I'll be using a passage from Eric McBey's Full Spectrum Resistance, aptly titled, to flesh out the range of actions that anti-fascists consider when they are thinking about force versus nonviolent resistance with or without physical force versus unarmed violence in protest scenarios versus armed violence.
I'm not quoting this to invoke a one-to-one comparison between the on-the-ground conditions Ture is immersed in in 1969 with how anti-fascists today consider defending sidewalks and restaurant kitchens and neighborhoods against ICE or Trumpian thugs.
Every condition is different.
I'm quoting Ture for the philosophical reasoning that helps to separate feelings about violence.
The most perturbing question for the liberal is the question of violence.
The liberal's initial reaction to violence is to try to convince the oppressed that violence is an incorrect tactic, that violence will not work, that violence never accomplishes anything.
Well, the Europeans took America through violence, and through violence they established the most powerful country in the world.
Through violence they maintain the most powerful country in the world.
It is absolutely absurd for one to say that violence never accomplishes anything.
And then here's where Tourette quarantines off the seeming moral questions that bog so much of this down to show how they're not actually matters of morality at all, but matters of legalized power.
Quote, It's not a question of whether it's right to kill or it is wrong to kill.
Killing goes on.
Let me give an example.
If I were in Vietnam, if I killed 30 yellow people who were pointed out to me by white Americans as my enemy, I would be given a medal.
I would become a hero.
I would have killed America's enemy.
But America's enemy is not my enemy.
If I were to kill 30 white policemen in Washington D.C. who have been brutalizing my people and who are my enemy, I would get the electric chair.
It is simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence.
In Vietnam, our violence is legalized by white America.
In Washington D.C., my violence is not legalized because Africans living in Washington D.C. do not have the power to legalize their violence.
And so he's really lucid then on the double standard, that people with power raise moral questions about violence only when the oppressed use it against them.
And further, that it is only certain forms of violence that are spotlighted for investigation.
So he writes, quote, Is it not violent for a child to go to bed hungry in the richest country in the world?
I think that is violent.
But that type of violence is so institutionalized that it becomes part of our way of life.
Not only do we accept poverty, we even find it normal.
Now, while we're back in the day with Touré, we have to know that alongside big swaths of the Black Power movement he was part of, his understanding of forceful resistance to the cruelty of the American state was inseparable from a broader anti-colonialist discourse in which fighting back in self-defense was about justice but also basic dignity.
Frantz Fanon, the Martinique...
Psychiatrist and Marxist who published Black Skin, White Mask in 1952 and The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, the year he died of leukemia at the age of 36 only, he opened his chapter concerning violence in the latter book by asserting that seeking justice through decolonization was always a violent process.
As a psychiatrist, he noted the impossible situation of a colonized child who, as soon as they are born, it is obvious to them that their cramped world riddled with taboos can only be challenged by out-and-out violence.
Now, Fanon did not glorify violence, but he described forceful resistance and self-defense as a potentially liberating energy, freeing the oppressed person from inferiority, despair, and inaction.
And that brings me back to my friend Michael, who had a different personalized understanding.
I always thought of nonviolence as a way of using meditation and bodily awareness to stay disciplined during times of turbulence.
In my life as a father in the relatively peaceful city of Toronto, most of the violence I have encountered is in my own heart and mind, a temper, old emotions rooted in my childhood, and irritation when my son takes an hour to put on his snow pants.
I've never had to respond to a group of young people burning a police car in front of a bank with military helicopters circling overhead and a son in my arms asking for an explanation.
So Michael died in 2017, but I think if he'd gotten to see all of this unfold and as he had gotten older, I can imagine us chatting today a little more intelligently as...
Two white guys about who exactly our city has never been safe for, and how nonviolence can afford to be naive if it's never tested by marginalization or material consequence.
And maybe how there's a lot of people who want to use the aesthetics and rhetoric of social change, especially on social media, to energize their personal entrepreneurial projects, and that this has also diluted the material meaning of resisting violence.
Okay, so at this point, I hope there's been enough catharsis over the general feelings evoked by punching and self-defense and rebelling and justice to home in on some definitions.
What are we really talking about when we use the terms violence and nonviolence?
How opposed are they really?
This is a crucial question because everything I've explored so far has only really excavated the cloudy morality and psychology of the issue to get down to this level.
And what is more important than anything else to the anti-fascist is the question of what works to get fascism to go away.
That means that we have to talk about tactics really precisely, and that's what I'll get to in the episode that drops in two days on Patreon.
And I'll finish out that episode with a discussion of how anti-fascist direct action and mutual aid are actually inseparable by discussing two films.
So there's the...
2022 adaptation of Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline, directed by Daniel Goldhaber with co-writers Ariella Berer and Jordan Seol.
And then the incredible 1995 film Land and Freedom by Ken Loach about an unemployed Englishman in 1936 who joins an anarchist militia in Aragon fighting in the international brigades against Franco.
