Bonus Sample: Beyond Violence and Nonviolence (Part 2)
Matthew is back today for more with Ben Case: profiling Gene Sharp and the (non)politics of strategic nonviolence, plus his strange funding sources. Also: why did Erica Chenoweth speak out against antifascist Trump protesters in January of 2017, and suggest their research proved that property damage and scuffles with the police would ruin any opposition movement to Trump? Also: where does the funding come from for all this bad research? Gene Sharp worked for the Department of Defense, and today, Bill Ackerman is a top funder of strategic nonviolence research.
Case is a retired professional Muaythai fighter, an organizer, educator, and writer. He is a researcher at the Center for Work and Democracy and a fellow at the Resistance Studies Initiative.
Show Notes
Street Rebellion: Resistance Beyond Violence and Nonviolence | Case
Why Civil Resistance Works | Columbia University Press
Why Not Riot? Interview with Author Ben Case - CounterPunch.org
Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part One) – Nonsite.org
Have Repertoire, Will Travel: Nonviolence as Global Contentious Performance
Violence Will Only Hurt the Trump Resistance | The New Republic
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Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes, of which this is one, on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
So, this bonus episode is a continuation of the anti-fascist woodshed series, and it's also part two of Beyond Violence and Nonviolence with Muay Thai professional and street rebellion scholar Ben Case, who joined me this past Saturday to break the spine on this whole mess of...
Defining violence versus nonviolence, both in the public sphere and in the academic literature.
So today we're going to go back into that scholarship to examine how Gandhi's idea of Satyagraha became a secularized yet still spiritual demand that we imagine resisting colonialism and fascism as a...
exercise, devoid of emotion, devoid of political passion, and devoid of the volatility of one action leading to another.
We'll track the career of Gene Sharp, the patron saint of strategic nonviolence, through to the rock star academic status of Erika Chenoweth, who, along with Maria Stephan, Claimed to have empirically validated Sharpe's instinct that only nonviolence, though he poorly defined it, could work.
They didn't actually validate it, but now there's a whole civil resistance industry out there that thinks that they did.
And more than that, we'll look at the sources of institutional funding for this work and its ties to U.S. foreign and domestic policy interests.
Benjamin Case is a retired professional Muay Thai fighter, an organizer, educator, and writer.
He's a researcher at the Center for Work and Democracy and a fellow at the Resistance Studies Initiative.
Case is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Here's part two of our conversation, Beyond Violence and Nonviolence.
Beyond Violence and Nonviolence.
Ben Case, welcome back to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thanks, happy to be back.
Okay, so we know from last time that Gandhian nonviolence has been a core influence in liberal and liberal left thought for about 75 years.
Now, in its spirituality mode, it was very influential in certain civil rights circles and anti-Vietnam protest movements.
But at a certain point, there was a movement to make the metaphysical principle, the spiritual principle of Satyagraha empirical, and to kind of divorce it from its metaphysical commitments and show that it was superior strategically to any other form of resistance.
And there's one main guy at the center of all of that, so I want to just start with you giving us a 101 on Gene Sharp.
Okay, so Gene Sharp is the sort of you might think of as the father of...
Modern nonviolence.
And he got his start as a Gandhi scholar.
He wrote a biography of Gandhi, and he wrote a very influential three-volume work called The Politics of Nonviolent Action, which came out of his dissertation in political theory at Oxford.
And the sort of main intervention that is important to know about Sharp is that he's distinguishing, by studying Gandhi, which we talked about a little bit last time, right?
He's sort of distinguishing between the nonviolent And so he's saying, let's leave aside for the moment the belief that nonviolence is a more righteous way to be in the world, can make you a better person.
Let's leave all that aside for the moment, and let's actually just look at how Gandhi mobilized nonviolent action to create leverage against the British military.
And so that's really his most important intervention.
And so he takes from that, okay, well, If Gandhi could overthrow British occupation using nonviolent struggle, we should be able to formulate a theory of nonviolent action that can allow us to do that elsewhere.
And so he comes up with this, again, this theory that he publishes in this book and elsewhere.
And the sort of main idea here is that political authority is ultimately reliant on people's It relies on the consent of the governed.
And this is not...
Something that is unique to Sharp.
A lot of people have realized this.
But it's important, and Sharp articulates it in a particularly kind of simple and accessible way.
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