PACIFISM, PART IV
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations [sic] were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.
THE FINAL ARGUMENT I’VE OFTEN HEARD FROM PACIFISTS IS THAT violence never accomplishes anything. This argument, even more than any of the others, reveals how completely, desperately, and arrogantly out of touch many dogmatic pacifists are with physical, emotional, and spiritual reality.
If violence accomplishes nothing, how do these people believe the civilized conquered North and South America and Africa, and before these Europe, and before that the Middle East, and since then the rest of the world? The indigenous did not and do not hand over their land because they recognize they’re faced with “a high stage of social and cultural development.” The land was (and is) seized and the people living there were (and are) slaughtered, terrorized, beaten into submission. The tens of millions of Africans killed in the slave trade would be surprised to learn their slavery was not the result of widespread violence. The same is true for the millions of women burned as witches in Europe. The same is true for the billions of passenger pigeons slaughtered to serve this economic system. The millions of prisoners stuck in gulags here in the U.S. and elsewhere would be astounded to discover that they can walk away anytime they want, that they are not in fact held there by force.
Do the pacifists who say this really believe that people all across the world hand over their resources to the wealthy because they enjoy being impoverished, enjoy seeing their lands and their lives stolen—sorry, I guess under this formulation they’re not stolen but received gracefully as gifts—by those they evidently must perceive as more deserving? Do they believe women submit to rape just for the hell of it, and not because of the use or threat of violence?
One reason violence is used so often by those in power is because it works. It works dreadfully well.
And it can work for liberation as well as subjugation. To say that violence never accomplishes anything not only degrades the suffering of those harmed by violence but it also devalues the triumphs of those who have fought their way out of abusive or exploitative situations. Abused women or children have killed their abusers, and become free of his abuse. (Of course, often then the same selective law enforcement agencies and courts that failed to stop the original abuse now step in to imprison those who sent violence the wrong way up the hierarchy.) And there have been many indigenous and other armed struggles for liberation that have succeeded for shorter or longer periods.
In order to maintain their fantasies, dogmatic pacifists must ignore the harmful and helpful efficacy of violence.
266 Years ago I was asked by a publisher to review a book-length manuscript they had just received from a household-name pacifist activist. The document was a mess, and they said they might want me to help edit it. I was younger then, and far less assertive, so my comments were fairly minor throughout, until I came to a statement that made me curse and hurl my pen across the room, then get up and stalk outside for a long walk. The activist claimed that the American movement against the war in Vietnam was a triumph for pacifist resistance, and that it showed that if enough people were just dedicated enough to nonviolence they could bring about liberation in all parts of the globe. He mentioned the four dead at Kent State as martyrs to this nonviolent campaign, and also mentioned “our unfortunate soldiers who lost their lives fighting for this unjust cause,” but never once mentioned the millions of Vietnamese who outfought, outdied, and outlasted the invaders. My point is not to disparage or ignore the importance of nonviolent protests in the United States and elsewhere, but rather to point out what the pacifist pointedly ignored: the antiwar movement didn’t stop the U.S. invasion—it
helped stop the invasion. The primary work—and primary suffering—was done by the Vietnamese.
Oddly enough, the publisher didn’t hire me to edit it.
I am just being honest when I say that I have talked to hundreds of people who are ready to bring the war home. I’ve talked to those who went down to assist the Zapatistas but were told, “If you really want to help, go home and start the same thing there.” I’ve talked to family farmers, prisoners, gang members, environmentalists, animal rights activists, hackers, former members of the military who have had their fill of their own enslavement and the destruction of all they love, and who are ready at long last to begin to fight back. I have spoken to Indians who have said their people are ready to bring back out the ceremonial war clubs they have now kept buried or hidden for so long. I have spoken to students and other men and women in their teens, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties who know the world is being killed, and are ready to fight and to kill and if necessary to die to stop this destruction, who, like me, are not willing to stand by while the world is destroyed.
I give a talk. Afterwards someone asks, “How do we hold CEOs accountable for their actions?”
I look hard at the person, but before I can piece together my answer, I hear a voice from the back of the room, “A bullet to the brain does wonders.”
I don’t say anything. I am surprised, I have to admit, at the number of people I see nodding solemnly. At least half.
The person again shouts out, “What other accountability is there?”
Finally I speak, “There is no legal accountability: when was the last time you saw a CEO put in prison for murder (or for anything, really)? When was the last time you saw a war criminal who won put in prison? Can you say Henry Kissinger? Put in the name of your favorite politician. And there is no moral accountability. A lot of these jokers think they’re going to heaven. They all have their claims to virtue, and many of them probably believe them. And there is no communal accountability. These people are, like Hitler, admired. What’s left?”
The same person shouts out, “Flesh. They’re mortal. They die as surely as do the people they’ve killed.”
It’s a big hall, and it’s dark in the back. I can’t see who it is. It doesn’t matter. Many people have expressed these same thoughts to me, only in private. I cannot tell you how many times I have thought them myself, only once again in private.
Someone else calls out, “But they’ll just get replaced.”
And a third person, “Take them out, too. And the next and the next. Eventually they’ll get the message.”
I feel certain this is what Tecumseh would have done.
The second person again, “Violence never acts as a deterrent.”
A sharp laugh from the back and someone says, “Ted Bundy.”
“What?”
“The state’s violence deterred him from killing again.”
“He didn’t have to be killed.”
“He was kept in prison by force.”
A woman in the front says, “And the violence of men against women is a huge deterrent. Why do you think I don’t walk alone at night? I have been deterred by violence. Don’t tell me that violence is not a deterrent.”
“Why do you think it is,” someone else chimes in, “that we don’t all rise up right now to overthrow this horrid system? We’re afraid of getting killed or sent to prison. Violence works great as a deterrent. It’s just we don’t use it.”
“Someone show me,” I said, “a peaceful way we can make those in power stop killing the world, and I will be on board faster than you would think possible. But I just don’t see it. I just don’t see it.”
Ward Churchill puts it well: “There is not a petition campaign that you can construct that is going to cause the power and the status quo to dissipate. There is not a legal action that you can take; you can’t go into the court of the conqueror and have the conqueror announce the conquest to be illegitimate and to be repealed; you cannot vote in an alternative, you cannot hold a prayer vigil, you cannot burn the right scented candle at the prayer vigil, you cannot have the right folk song, you cannot have the right fashion statement, you cannot adopt a different diet, build a better bike path. You have to say it squarely: the fact that this power, this force, this entity, this monstrosity called the State maintains itself by physical force, and can be countered only in terms that it itself dictates and therefore understands. That’s a deep breath time; that’s a real deep breath time.
“It will not be a painless process, but, hey, newsflash: it’s not a process that is painless now. If you feel a relative absence of pain, that is testimony only to your position of privilege within the Statist structure. Those who are on the receiving end, whether they are in Iraq, they are in Palestine, they are in Haiti, they are in American Indian reserves inside the United States, whether they are in the migrant stream or the inner city, those who are ‘othered’ and of color in particular but poor people more generally, know the difference between the painless-ness of acquiescence on the one hand and the painfulness of maintaining the existing order on the other. Ultimately, there is no alternative that has found itself in reform; there is only an alternative that founds itself—not in that fanciful word of revolution—but in the devolution, that is to say the dismantlement of Empire from the inside out.”
267
I’m really angry that I had to spend the last couple of months deconstructing pacifist arguments that don’t make any sense anyway. I’m angry that I’ve had to spend the last three years writing this book to show conclusions that should be pretty damn obvious. Newsflash: Civilization is killing the planet. (I’ve often heard that pattern recognition is one sign of intelligence. Let’s see if we can spot this pattern in less than six thousand years. When you think of the landscape of Iraq, where civilization began, do you normally think of cedar forests so thick sunlight never reaches the ground? That’s how it was prior to civilization. How about the Arabian peninsula? Do you think of oak savannah? That’s how it was prior to civilization. When you think of Lebanon, do you think of cedars? At least they have one on their flag. Prior to the arrival of civilization, it was heavily forested, as were Greece, Italy, North Africa, France, Britain, Ireland. How long will it take you to see this pattern? How long will it take you to do something about it?) Newsflash: Civilization is based on violence. Newsflash: The system is psychopathological. Newsflash: This entire culture requires our disconnection from each other and especially from our landbases. Newsflash: This entire culture inculcates us into irresponsibility and would not survive were we to gain even a shred of responsibility.
I just received an email from a friend: “There are so many people who fear making decisions and taking responsibility. Kids are trained and adults are encouraged not to make decisions and take responsibility. Or more accurately they are trained to engage only in false choices. Whenever I think about the culture and all the horrors it perpetrates and we allow, and whenever I consider our typical response to being faced with difficult choices, it seems clear to me that everything in the culture leads us to ‘choose’ rigid, controlled, unresponsive ‘responses’ over fluidity, real choice, and personal responsibility for and to those choices. Every time. Every single time.
“Pacifism is but one example of this. Pacifism is of course less multifaceted in its denial and delusions than some aspects of the culture (in other words, more obvious in its stupidity), but it’s all part of the same thing: control and denial of relationship and responsibility on one hand versus making choices and taking responsibility in particular circumstances on the other. A pacifist eliminates choice and responsibility by labeling great swaths of possibility off-limits for action and even for discussion. ‘See how pure I am for making no wrong choices?’ they can say, while in reality facing no choices at all. And of course they actually are making choices. Choosing inaction—or ineffective action—in the face of exploitation or abuse is about as impure an action as anyone can conceptualize. But these ineffective actions can provide the illusion of effectiveness: no matter what else can be said about pacifism, even with the gigantic problems we face, pacifism and other responses that do not threaten the larger concentration camp status quo are certainly achievable. That’s something, I guess. But it all reminds me of those who go to therapists to create the illusion that they’re doing something, rather than the few who actually work to face their fears and patterns and take an active role in transformation.
“Pacifism is a toxic mimic of love, isn’t it? Because it actually has nothing to do with loving another. Could it be said that toxic mimics are toxic in part because they ignore responsibility, they ignore relationship, they ignore presence, they substitute control for fluidity and choice? Toxic mimics are of course products and causes of insanity. Could it be said that a lack of responsibility, relationship, and presence, and the substitution of control for fluidity and choice are causes and products of insanity?”