Posts Tagged ‘nonviolence’
Friday End of the Semester Why Aren’t I Already Sleeping Links
* Don’t Sanitize Nelson Mandela: He’s Honored Now, But Was Hated Then. Apartheid’s Useful Idiots. History Needs to Be Honest. The National Review, American Conservatism, and Nelson Mandela. Six Things Nelson Mandela Believed That Most People Won’t Talk About. The Island. Mandela will never, ever be your minstrel. Some reservations about non-violent resistance. Mandela and the Pistons. The inevitable Žižek. Be Nelson Mandela.
* The 130 cities where fast-food workers struck Thursday.
* Graduate students and labor organizing after NYU and UAW.
* Many New Ph.D.’s Emerge Deeper in Debt Than in the Past, Survey Shows.
* It’s Not Just Football: Other college athletes are actually more likely to suffer concussions.
* Great moments in legal absurdism: Unarmed Man Is Charged With Wounding Bystanders Shot by Police Near Times Square.
* The climate of Middle Earth.
* And the US has drawn an epically bad World Cup group. Well, there’s always 2018…
Tuesday!
* Well, it was nice while it lasted: Guatemalan Court Overturns Genocide Conviction of Ex-Dictator.
* College sports as investment bubble? Reform or Retreat?
* MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility for How Courses Are Used.
* One of 500. Come for the thoughtful and reflective essay, stay for the shit-stirring, dickish comments…
* How the US Turned Three Pacifists into Violent Terrorists. The headline is a bit misleading; this is about word games prosecutors play.
* ‘Arrested Development’ Creator Mitch Hurwitz on His Two-Year Odyssey to Revive the Show.
* And over at Dear Television Lili Loofbourow has a good thing on the latest Mad Men episode, too.
Violence and Nonviolence
“Non-violence” takes a distinction created by the state (between violence and non-violence) and then applies this moralistically to the tactics of the movement, such that any stepping outside of these boundaries becomes, not a disagreement about tactics, but an occasion for condemnation (this reminds me of re-reading King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” recently, and being struck by the way in which King puts forward a clearly moral position without seeming to me to be moralistic; I’m interested in tring to figure out exactly where the distinction lies). The situation where “non-violent” activists cooperate with the state in condemning their supposed comrades is not accidental, but flows directly from their philosophy; it is to the credit of those non-violent activists who refuse to do this that they put solidarity ahead of their philosophy.
Some interesting thoughts on violence and nonviolence in activism at An und für sich. I especially appreciated this citation of David Graeber:
“I remember my surprise and amusement, the first time I met activists from the April 6 Youth Movement from Egypt, when the issue of non-violence came up. “Of course we were non-violent,” said one of the original organizers, a young man of liberal politics who actually worked at a bank. “No one ever used firearms, or anything like that. We never did anything more militant than throwing rocks!”
‘Gandhi and the Politics of Nonviolence’
I want to suggest, though, that the myth about Gandhi develops in the same way that it develops about Martin Luther King so that we as a movement internalize the lesson that’s most beneficial for the 1% of society. That lesson is as follows: that we fail as movements because we are violent, not because they are; that we ought not to talk about openly defending ourselves against their violence, even though they are prepared to and talk all the time about using brutal force against us, as we saw in Oakland just last weekend; that we as a movement should police ourselves and focus on internal divisions, which they happen to sow; and we should continue to believe that the reasons they hold on to power, wealth, oppression, and arms is because we are not sufficiently pious, humble, or meek.
Happy MLK Day Links
* American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white. Via MeFi.
* Tim Wise on the disappearance of the real MLK.
So we compartmentalize the non-violence message, much as we compartmentalize books about Dr. King and the movement in that section of the bookstore established for African American History; much as we have compartmentalized those streets named for the man: locating them only in the blackest and often poorest parts of town.
Were this tendency to render King divisible on multiple levels — abstracting non-violence from justice, colorblindness from racial equity, and public service from radical social transformation — merely an academic matter, it would hardly merit our concern. But its impact is greater than that. Our only hope as a society is to see the connections between the issues King was addressing and our current predicament, to see that what affects part of the whole affects the greater body, to understand that racism and racial inequity must be of concern to us all, because they pose risks to us all.
* But let us never forget that the civil rights movement was completely unnecessary in the first place; a “truly free market” would have ended segregation on its own.
* Martin Luther King in science fiction.
* Why we can’t have nice things: Jon Hamm is just too damn old to play Superman.
* Schwarzenegger says being governor cost him 200 million dollars. You’re welcome, California.
* When assassins get results: Arizona law could force Gabrielle Giffords out of her seat within months.
* The Edge Question 2011: What scientific concept would improve everyone’s toolkit? There are some good nominations, but for a twenty-first century civilization teetering on the brink of ecological suicide there’s only one right answer: TANSTAAFL.
* Towns for losers: the highway’s jammed with broken heroes fleeing the ruins of New Jersey. Let’s hope Chris Christie isn’t next to make the big move to D.C.
* And naturally you had me at Soviet workplace safety posters. Via MeFi.