matt taylor responds. can we stop discussing “non-violence” please???

Here is Matthew's response. And mine.

Matt,

The only person, the sole confused, ethically bankrupt, fundamentalist, Gandhian teenager enamored of posies and pacifism here is you. You fundamentally mis-read my remark about the position of the Western commenter for the same reason a Zionist literally cannot comprehend the original sin of 1948: you are a racist. Admit it, and this will be easier. You do seek to instruct Palestinians. You “condemn any form of violence/terrorism that targets civilians, perpetrated by any party (state or non-state), on moral grounds,” so you condemn Palestinian terrorism and especially Palestinian rockets out of Gaza. This is racist. You have no standing to issue that condemnation, unless you think your toils reading Gandhi, hanging out with Tommy Nagler, and having a safari out to Bilin give you that standing. You not only do not understand this and the way the point generalizes, but work your hardest to create pieces of writing whose effect, whose only possible effect, is to create a framing that makes Palestinian violence illegitimate when that violence is part-and-parcel of Israeli violence.

Condemnation creates a corollary, too, which is suggesting alternatives. No alternatives, less grounds for condemnation. Israelis have alternatives: lift blockade, end occupation, bi-national state. Enormous responsibility, enormous condemnation. Understand that responsibility rests in the hands of those who have choices, and Palestinians in Gaza have few choices and so little responsibility. You fetishize martial violence and ignore structural, institutional, or bio-political violence, and the way they are constantly defended, at the end of the day, by a man with a gun, and by a man with a pen legitimating the actions of the man with a gun. Your refusal to see that you are that man with a pen is saddening. You are quite eager to write the Palestinian right to violent resistance out of the tablet of moral laws issued by the Peace and Conflict Studies Community, which also lecturing Palestinians and the solidarity movement alike on how to act:

Keep in mind that this started as a debate about the Mavi Marmara passengers' actions, not Palestinians' actions in the territories. I agree that we cannot tell Palestinians what to do, we can only offer input if it's welcome and requested.

I add here that this glossing of your first piece of writing is deeply dishonest, a recurring pattern, since you and Nagler both started issuing diktats about how Palestinians had no right to violent resistance almost immediately.

Matthew, a quick note: Words matter. They matter for their effects. Your words literally will have no positive effect on the Palestinian struggle, because Palestinians in Palestine are generally (a) agreed on the utility of non-violence at the present moment (b) are not quite so eager to give up their right to self-defense and (c) probably not reading this exchange. Your words could have a negative effect. They could convince people that condemning Palestinian violence, no less by the people who pay for it, who live in states with borders protected by violence, is OK. It is not.

Here you are borrowing a definition of “violence” and “non-violence”:

Nonviolence is a powerful method to harmonize relationships among people (and all living things) for the establishment of justice and the ultimate well-being of all parties. It draws its power from awareness of the profound truth to which the wisdom traditions of all cultures, science, and common experience bear witness: that all life is one….

And not borrowing one:

If you hold in your heart love for the adversary and a desire to persuade instead of coerce him/her to see the Truth (you are always holding fast to Truth), and you seek to both achieve justice AND reconcile your relationship with the adversary so that all parties benefit, then your campaign is in fact driven by true nonviolence” whereas “if you wish to coerce or force the adversary to do what you want without care or regard to his well being or how your relationship will be affected or end up, then you are driven by violence.

(You are actually slightly more coherent than the person you quote. I recommend excising yourself immediately from the Peace and Conflict Studies community. The rot may be infectious). Anyway, these are not coherent understandings or conceptualizations of violence or non-violence. The first definition of non-violence is just babble. The second definition excludes coercive BDS from the spectrum of “non-violence,” and actually makes it “violent,” hence illegitimate for “principled” practitioners of non-violence. Now these are labored understandings of violence and non-violence that depart far from what anyone reasonable person would understand by the terms, and they still don’t make any sense. If this is the distillate of how my (unrebutted) ideas about the spectrum and melding of violence and non-violence have “been so thoroughly rebutted by other scholars,” you can once again fuck off, because your only resort to an argument is argument-by-authority.

On the academic literature. I have read enough of it not to read anymore. It’s a mélange of racist ethical thought, 3^rd-rate political science, theology, and historical sociology for the mentally retarded. It has no discernible influence on the movement, except to reinforce an already hegemonic faith in non-violence. Trust me, the Mavi Marmara incident convinced a lot of people that using force in self-defense is a good idea. Also Matt this is a standing invitation to please by all means kill me if I were “to submit an article to a serious academic journal with such characterizations, and the journal was edited by anyone deeply familiar with Gandhi, your article would be rejected out of hand,” or hold myself out as a Gandhi expert.

You seem to think that Gandhi’s campaign worked, and then cite Toynbee. You want to wave around the Peace and Conflict Studies literature? I recommend Paige or Zeitlin or Tilly on historical causation.  We all know Gandhi’s campaign didn’t work, it didn’t work at all, while India now is a neo-liberal hellhole where peasants kill themselves with pesticides.

You cite King on India:

The aftermath of violence is always bitterness; the aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community so that when the battle is over, it’s over, and a new love and a new understanding and a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor.

Frankly, I like Barrington Moore on India better. Here are the relevant questions: what happened to British metropolitan capital formation before and after Indian independence? What happened to the Indian political economy? What were the effects of Gandhi’s refusal to braid economic doctrines into his non-violence? India is one of the most desperately poor places on earth. Bangladesh will be underwater soon. Now Moore for example has tied some of this to Gandhi, suggesting that India’s path to independence and democracy came at the cost of a failure to radically break with the past, in part, not wholly, because Gandhi’s struggle had no component of socialism. In lieu of class-based allegiances people turned to communal violence, encouraged by the British and accepted by power-seekers within Indian society who encouraged communal violence when the other option was class-based upsurges that would have threatened their privilege.

Socialism is to the point here—it is a way of destroying structural violence that you normalize and naturalize and don’t really care about. Gandhi refused to take up class struggle on mostly moral grounds. You must be aware of this. So when you are talking about Gandhi’s “non-violence” and don’t think of it consequentially, you should think a little about this. Violence is not simply the flash-point of confrontation between oppressor and oppressed but the threat of that flash-point and what it means for those who living under a regime of structural violence. They are scared of that flash point and so live in misery instead. Violence isn’t just soldiers shooting civilians. It’s also children dying when a generator in Rafah explodes because the Israelis don’t let enough gas in for the main grid. I don’t know why you don’t consider these things, but please stop making the readers here the casualty of your thoughtlessness.

Frankly, we have no evidence that non-violence or non-violence can “work,” least of all for leftists. If the Spanish anarchists had better weapons in 1936 who knows what could have happened—better weapons both to resist the violence of the fascists and the treachery of the communists. We have no idea if anything will “work.” We may all be going to hell on a planet that is burning. It’s an ideology that there is an inevitably better world waiting for us, and in the meantime, as Edward Thompson pointed out, generations are born, live and die in the tunnel of this world and the point is, right here, right now, to focus on alleviating their misery. There are people with guns in this world who will unceasingly kill to defend their privilege. I can see how this would not matter to someone already privileged, a beneficiary of structural violence, but for others, it is something worth keeping in mind. You think knowing Gandhi helps understand the Israel Palestine conflict but it doesn’t.

On principles, tactics, empirics, and strategies: I realize that you are deliberately mis-reading. I said within your binary, there are those who hew to non-violence as a principle. But then I rejected your binary, and all you can do in response is fling “scholars” and “academics” at me.

Your arguments where you engage with what I said as opposed to your renditions of what I said are at their core semantic. My uses make sense within their contexts and make less sense out of them. Specifically, there is an immense misunderstanding of Gandhi as a categorical pacifist who totally disavowed violence and it is that sense of “principle” that I was attacking. Correctly. You think that I imply that “Gandhi would have been an advocate of possible armed resistance as a better choice than nonviolence,” but you are off base both factually and more relevantly, generally: you think that I misunderstand Gandhi, but in fact I reject his utility to this debate entirely, and refuse to be another ninny invoking Gandhi when discussing how brown people should resist American violence. I reject the grounds of this scoundrels’ debate but you want to make it your life’s work. Of course you can’t listen to or understand what I am saying.

For your claim about “skepticism”: you have no idea what I think. Each situation is different, which doesn’t make me a skeptic. It makes me a realist. Skeptics question efficacy of tactics. I am not a skeptic of principled non-violence, especially from (aspiring) intellectuals. I think the correct response to urinate on them, recognizing their humanity and the fact that they are being so insistently silly, naïve, and ethically blind that perhaps this is the one course that will wake them up.

As I have made very clear, and you have repeatedly, at the length of thousands and thousands of words, refused to understand, principled non-violence is an ideology in the classic sense of the word, a misunderstanding of the actual world, because you are responsible for violence. You cannot be a principled practitioner of non-violence and carry out violence, and Matthew, you are responsible for violence! Your privilege is the result of violence! You live in Berkeley and Berkeley isn’t inundated by Palestinian refugees from Gaza because of violence, because force repels illegal immigrants and force pens the Gazans in and you pay for that force and never throw yourself on that machine—American society—that produces that force, that violence.

You write, “I do not need to stick my head in front of an Israeli gun in order to accurately argue what Gandhi would have said about the Mavi Marmara and the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Nor does sticking one’s head in front of the gun automatically impart such wisdom.” Correct. Knowing what Gandhi would have said is not possible with or without sticking your head in front of an Israeli gun. Gandhi’s dead.

Finally: Matt, I don’t want your respect, and don’t offer it as some coin that I take payment in. Don’t offer it as a cheap debater’s trick after which you can mis-represent what I said, lie, mis-read, refuse-to-read, refuse-to-understand, contrast your Peace Studies Learnedness to my silly, unlearned, incorrect “bravery, courage, commitment, and passion,” and then highlight your racist refusal to countenance Palestinian violence as somehow the height of principled, erudite, righteousness. It’s the cheapest kind of demagogy, and no one is buying.

Technorati Tags: Barrington moore, Gandhi, Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Mondoweiss, non-violence, Palestine, resistance movements, violence

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