sophie
Break My Heart
I'm not watching an annoying homemade video by some basement revolutionary or philosopher. One of the things I detest most about the current Internet Age is people linking videos as responses and expecting the other to sit through it. I ONLY watch YouTube for official music videos and, occasionally, old amusing television commercials from my youth in the '80's I have fond memories of. If it isn't in a text article, it isn't worth my time. I'm sorry, but my stance across the board - it's not just you or this unwatched video.
I don't generally link to "annoying homemade videos" by "basement revolutionaries." The work put out was done by someone who has studied Philosophy at the Master's level, and is, speaking personally, of a kind with the Master's-level work I have encountered in my time at the University of Chicago. That being said, because you won't watch the video, because you are some ridiculous old who insists on screaming at clouds, and because I think the video is important because it neatly summarizes and refutes most of the fallacious argumentation tactics that have been brought forth in this thread so far, I have reproduced the relevant section, in full, into a medium that you profess to wanting to engage in.
Oliver Thorn, "The Philosophy of Antifa"
Part 3: Violence
Another kind of false equivalence is to say that antifascists and fascists are just as bad because both use violence. We've seen already that antifascist action is not violent all of the time and is targeted at those who are openly building fascism; contrastingly, we'll be seeing in Section 5 how contemporary fascism is truly genocidal in its ambitions so the first reason this is a false equivalence is just because the scale of the violence on the table here is not the same.
But still, some people maintain, that violence has no place in politics, and they criticize antifascism because it doesn't rule out using violence as a political tactic. And this idea is false in a very interesting way, because violence actually occupies every place in politics. Politics is the distribution of power, and power is enforced using violence. For instance, the army and the police force are both forms of controlled violence int he service of liberalism. Every border implies the violence necessary to maintain it; capitalism requires the threat of eviction and preventable poverty in order to motivate you to keep going to work. I mean, it's called the police force, not the police everybody-sit-down-and-talk-about-ti. Politics is all about violence. Every political ideology legitimizes violence against somebody, that's just what politics is. We often call things violent because they stand out to us, not from a background of peace, but from a background of things we might call violent if we really thought about it, but we ignore because they appear normal to use.¹ A great small example of this was drawn to my recent attention by LA Times Writer Adam Johnson, who points out that this Fox News headline says, "Violence breaks out after police kill a student," not "Violence breaks out when police kill a student." Do you see the difference there? The initial police killing is not there portrayed as violent, even though somebody was shot dead by people who carry guns in the service of the government. Because the police killing somebody is seen as normal. Be very clear about this though: just because all political ideologies legitimize violence somewhere, doesn't mean that they're all the same or equally good choices, and therefore it also doesn't follow from this that all violence done in the name of antifascism is good. What it means is, to say that a particular form of political engagement is bad because it features violence isn't quite enough, because they all do. If antifascism and fascism are equivalent because they both feature violence, then every political position is equivalent because they all feature violence. What separates them is who the violence is being done against, and why it's being done.
Some people will acknowledge that all politics feature some kind of violence, but still criticize antifascists because they think that the state should maintain a monopoly on that violence. So although the police and the army are agents of political violence, they work for the state, and, ideally, the state works for the people, so their use of violence represents at least some kind of democracy. Kind of like the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who said that governments should work by the people placing all power in the hands of an absolute ruler, who in return promises to maintain "peace," and "order." And that's a route you could go down, although antifascist actors might have some questions. They might ask you whether modern governments really do represent enough of a democratic ideal of accountability for that argument to fly. For instance, they might point out that "peace," and "order," are somewhat relative terms, and increasingly, order which remember is enforced with violence, is an order which benefits the rich at the expense of everybody else. They might, if they're anarchists, especially, flat out deny that the state should have a monopoly on violence. They might also point out that this Hobbes arrangement where all violence is within the state is on which greatly benefits fascists and allows them room to grow.
But let's return to that false equivalence between the Far Left and the Far Right. The idea that we're examining is the idea that both are the same because they both use violence, and we've seen already that the scale of the violence doesn't match, and that to say that a particular form of political engagement is violent is almost tautologous, because they all do. WHen it comes to understanding political violence, a concept that might help you is the Friend/Enemy Distinction, which comes from philosophyer, and Nazi in fact, Carl Schmitt. Don't say that I never cite any right-wing thinkers on the show. Schmitt said that your political enemies are the poeple that you might get along with, and one or two of them you might even like, but when push comes to shove, you will, not even necessarily kill them, but just let them die. You'll be okay with them being removed.³ Every political ideology uses violence somewhere - everybody has some political enemies - but another big difference between the Left and the Right is that they use the Friend/Enemy distinction in very different ways.
There's a famous antifascist play called "On the Frontier", by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, a play that I once had the pleasure of being in actually, in which a rich arms manufacturer called Valerian makes weapons for a fascist dictator. At the climax of the play, the fascist dictator is overthrown by his own people, who also kill Valerian himself. But, just before that, there's a crucial scene in which Valerian's friend comes to him and says, "It's all over, the revolution's happened, you need to run away with me now and abandon all your wealth and power, and flee to another country with me." And Valierian says, "No." He chooses to stay, and moreover, he chooses to give his money and weapons, not to the people trying to overthrow the fascist dictator, but to the fascists. And it's choice that distinguishes Valerian from the victims of the fascist government he supports. I'm not suggesting we should start executing industrialists; I'm illustrating that if you're a fascist, and antifascists come for you, you have a choice. You can give it up. You can renounce what you said, say, "I'm sorry, I'm going to retire, read a load of books, and understand why I was wrong." Alternatively, you could just go on with the rest of your life, and stop turning up to fascist rallies. And Antifascists, probably, aren't going to buy you a pint and be your best friend, but they'll move on. And the historical evidence supports this: when fascists in a particular city stop getting together and organizing, antifascists go back to their lives as well.⁴ In fact, some antifascists engage with fascists, and provide services to try and get them out of the movement, so that they can move on with their lives. But if you're a person of color, if you're trans, or a person with a disability, or gay, or Jewish, or whatever, and fascists come for you, there is nothing you can do that will make them happy, except stop existing. I'm going to demonstrate that in a little more detial in section 5, and the historical evidence supports it as well: every concession given to the fascists int he 20th Century, only emboldened them. That's the key ideological difference between the far Left and the far Right. Antifascists organize themselves against those who are building fascism. Not just those who have fascist sympathies, or fascist thoughts in the privacy of their own heads, but those who are choosing to be out in public building a fascist government, and if you're doing that, that is a thing that you can non-violently stop doing. If you're a political enemy of Antifa, you can become a friend. If you're a political enemy of fascism though, either they lose or you die.
Again, it does not follow from that that all violence done in the name of antifascism or done by the Left is okay. What it is to say, is that those who draw and equivalence between the Left and Right using violence, are missing a much richer and more interesting layer of philosophy. Another false equivalence you might see is when people associate antifascist action with terrorism: people wil try to form this association in your mind by talking about "left-wing terror," or "the Vegan ISIS," or by spreading the kind of lies that we looked at in Section 1 ["Meet the Antifascists"], and it relies on a not very helpful understanding of antifascism and a not very helpful understanding of terrorism. The dictionary definition of terrorism is, "the unlawful use of violence or intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims." This definition is a little bit inadequate, and the reason it's inadequate is because some Western military interventions, and even policing, actually fit that definition, for instance the Iraq War, and yet they are not commonly called terrorism, so the concept as it is being used in the political world by real people, never mind what it says on paper, must be a little bit more detailed and more refined that. According to terrorism scholar Louise Richardson, terrorists want three things: revenge, renown, and a response - that's a specific political response, like the withdrawal of troops from whatever area they're occupying.⁵ Antifascist actors tend not to seek renown, in fact they're notoriously media-shy. They do want specific political responses, though, like wanting fascists in that particular city to go home, but because they are local and flexible in their application of the theory, they tend to be less about revenge, in the way that for instance, some captured ISIS fighters have identified the Iraq War as a source of humiliation which motivated them to violence against America.⁶ Or, for instance, Elliot Rodger, who described his killing spree as "retribution" against women because they wouldn't sleep with him. Those are just two examples of "revenge" in terrorism, I'm not trying to draw any other kind of equivalence between them.
Another key feature of terrorism is that its targets are fungible, which means interchangeable. The victims of a terrorist bombing, or again, Rodger's victims, stand for a group, even if they are not personally doing the bad that thing that members of that group supposedly do. They may not personally have invaded Iraq, they may not have personally rejected the man - the point is the targets of terrorism are more symbolic than specific, and to the person committing the act, what each individual is actually doing politically doesn't really matter. Contrast that with, say, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, where the target was specifically chosen because of his political actions. Terrifying, no doubt, but not terrorism.
Because antifascist action tends to be local and specific, and specifically targets those who are doing a certain thing, namely building fascism, its targets are not really fungible, and therefore, comparing it to terrorism doesn't really help us understand the mindsets of either antifascists, or terrorists, for that matter. What it does do, is allow fascists to call for the state to use existing anti-terrorism measure to crack down on those who oppose them.
Having discussed political violence in the abstract, we're not ready to talk about it as a tactic. As prologue, we should note that the line between violent tactics and nonviolent tactics is often quite blurry, particularly where public protest is involved, because a protest can by loud and intimidating and tense, even without violence, and because, as we identified earlier, violence is a somewhat politically relative term. The supposed neat dichotomy between peaceful "Good Protesters" and violent "Bad Protesters" is used to justify excessively punishing those painted as "bad." For instance, at time of writing, around 200 people, including a handful of journalists, who were present at a present for the inauguration of President Donald Trump on January 20th of 2017, are facing felony charges ranging from rioting to conspiracy to riot. Without wishing to comment politically, two things are worth noting about these proceedings for our philosophical purposes: firstly, the evidence that the Trump regime is bringing against many of those charged is merely that they were present on the day and wearing black. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be sufficient evidence for criminal activity, since those are both perfectly legal things to do, but an attempt is being made to use the "bad protester" label to lower the bar of evidence required for conviction in the minds of those handling the cases. We might think that someone commits a crime and is then therefore a criminal, but it can work the other way around; convince people that someone is a criminal by nature, or by their association with something they already think is bad, and they will be more likely to believe that a crime has therefore been committed.
Another example of this comes from scholar Lisa Marie Cacho, who demonstrated that after Hurricane Katrina, black people retrieving supplies from abandoned shops were described by the media as "looting," but white people doing the exact same thing were described as "scavenging."⁷ In that case, black skin was a mark of criminality, and from that it was assumed that a crime must have been committed. The second thing worth noting about the January 20th cases, is that the batons, chemical gas, stun grenades, and kettling that the police used on the day, have not been painted as unduly violent, which demonstrates that the bar of evidence for showing that people working for the government are bad and violent is considerably higher than the bar required to demonstrate the same thing about those who disagree with the government. Again, we call things violent becuase they stand out, not from a background of peace, but from what we think is normal.
Some people will acknowledge that all politics involve violence somewhere, but will still say that using nonviolent tactics is more effective for achieving the desired goal. And undoubtedly, sometimes it is, which is why the vast majority of antifascist action, although confrontation, doesn't get directly physically violent. Antifascists regularly consider whether nonviolent tactics could be used instead: you don't want to only use violence, because there are some problems that violence can't solve. They also regularly consider the way that using violence as a tactic can play into the kind of machismo and toxic masculinity that certain political movements can sometimes get caught up in, which can shut down the contributions of antifascists of other genders.⁸
However, there is a long history of confrontational, violent, and illegal tactics succeeding in achieving their political goals. For instance, the American Revolution, the Irish War for Independence, the Haitian Slave Revolt, the Jamaican Slave Revolt. Hell, to look at the modern age, Stonewall, the catalyst for LGBT rights in the USA, was a literal brick-throwing riot. Not to mention the American Civil Rights Movement, to which the Black Panthers made their contribution. All of these a great deal more violent, you might notice, than contemporary antifascist action. And obviously, all of them a great deal less violent than fascism.
Here we have to restate the "Does it Work?" question that we examined in Part 1, and again, the answer is that it can depend. The historical record shows that direct confrontation can be very successful in shutting down fascists, but it can have its drawbacks too. Some people worry that using violence against fascists might make liberals sympathize with them, and in certain context, that can be right: optics is very important, as Contrapoints has pointed out before. Again though, that's something that antifascism, because it's a local and specific and flexible theory, will consider on a case-by-case basis. It's also important to bear in mind that liberals will tend to sympathize with fascists anyway for reasons that I've explained before here.⁹ The spectacle of antifascist violence can sometimes bring attention to fascists and recruitment, it's true. The antifascist response to that is that although it might bring some recruitment, if you can't hold a meeting, or you can't pass out flyers because you keep getting shut down, then attention is all well and good, but you won't be able to capitalize on it. In addition, the first time a fascist gets punched it gets a lot of attention. Second time: bit less attention, and the third time, even less. We also need to be careful not to oversimplify the reasons why people join fascist movements: if being a victim of violence was all it took for somebody to sympathize with your political cause, then a lot of other political movements would find their ranks filling up a lot faster than fascism's are.
Some people say that calling fascists "fascist," rather than letting them hide behind a euphemism might push them to embrace fascism. This is an empirical claim, and we can look to the historical evidence: feminists have been called "********s" for years, and women have been subjected to centuries of violence, but there hasn't been a mass conversion to fascism on the part of the female population. This argument seems also to imply that what's bad about fascists is the aesthetics of it, rather than the effects it has. The antifascist way of looking at it would be to say that it doesn't really matter whether fascists wear uniforms, or even openly identify as fascists, what matters is the effect of their political ideas.
Another objection is to be a pacifist, and say that whilst nonviolent tactics might not be as effective in certain circumstances, they are nevertheless morally required. And that's a road you could go down. ANtifascists might say in response to you, that they expect you to condemn the violence of the state, and the violence of fascism in similar terms. They might also point, as we'll be explaining in a little bit more detail later on, that there is no peaceful form of fascism, and therefore direct action against it could be seen as self-defense, which again is something that you could deny is morally acceptable: people do deny that violent self-defense is okay. History can give us clues in this discussion: in my country, Britain, we have a specific word for not resisting fascism, the word is "appeasement." Appeasement was Britain's official policy towards Hitler before World War II: just give him what he wants and hope he's satisfied; today, to call someone an appeaser is quite a strong political insult because - spoilers for anybody watching this in the year 1939 - appeasement didn't work. In fact, it could never have worked, as we'll be seeing in Part 5, peaceful coexistence with fascism was never really an option.
You might see people say that "hate" is on both sides, and that "love" must win. I've talked about the words love and hate in politics here before, so I won't dwell on that, but do be aware that hate vs love talk can be used to draw false equivalences too.¹⁰ Do also be aware that fascists love these false equivalences and will hide behind them to try and gain your sympathy. Before we move on, I'll say this again explicitly for the third time, for those determined to misunderstand me: none of this means that all Left Wing violence is okay. What it means is the equivalence between the left and the right is a false one that benefits fascism.
¹Ture, Stokely Speaks
²Hobbes, Leviathan
³Schmitt, Political Theology and the Concept of the Political
⁴Bray, Antifa: the Antifascist Handbook
⁵Richardson, What Terrorists Want
⁶Wilson, "What I Discovered From Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters"
⁷Cacho, Social Death
⁸Bray, Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook
⁹Oliver Thorn, "What Was Liberalism? #2 Capitalism & History"
¹⁰Oliver Thorn, "Do Racists Just 'Love Their Country?'"
I'm so glad I'm over my teenage ambition of becoming an academic.
