Jun 15 JDN 2460842

As I write this, the LA protests and the crackdown upon them have continued since Friday and it is now Wednesday. In a radical and authoritarian move by Trump, Marines have been deployed (with shockingly incompetent logistics unbefitting the usually highly-efficient US military); but so far they have done very little. Reuters has been posting live updates on new developments.

The LAPD has deployed a variety of less-lethal weapons to disperse the protests, including rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper balls; but so far they have not used lethal force. Protesters have been arrested, some for specific crimes—and others simply for violating curfew.

More recently, the protests have spread to other cities, including New York, Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, San Fransisco, and Philadelphia. By the time this post goes live, there will probably be even more cities involved, and there may also be more escalation.

But for now, at least, the protests have been largely nonviolent.

And I thought it would be worthwhile to make it very clear what I mean by that, and why it is important.

I keep seeing a lot of leftist people on social media accepting the narrative that these protests are violent, but actively encouraging that; and some of them have taken to arrogantly accuse anyone who supports nonviolent protests over violent ones of either being naive idiots or acting in bad faith. (The most baffling part of this is that they seem to be saying that Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi were naive idiots or were acting in bad faith? Is that what they meant to say?)

First of all, let me be absolutely clear that nonviolence does not mean comfortable or polite or convenient.

Anyone objecting to blocking traffic, strikes, or civil disobedience because they cause disorder and inconvenience genuinely does not understand the purpose of protest (or is a naive idiot or acting in bad faith). Effective protests are disruptive and controversial. They cause disorder.

Nonviolence does not mean always obeying the law.

Sometimes the law is itself unjust, and must be actively disobeyed. Most of the Holocaust was legal, after all.

Other times, it is necessary to break some laws (such as property laws, curfews, and laws against vandalism) in the service of higher goals.

I wouldn’t say that a law against vandalism is inherently unjust; but I would say that spray-painting walls and vehicles in the service of protecting human rights is absolutely justified, and even sometimes it’s necessary to break some windows or set some fires.

Nonviolence does not mean that nobody tries to call it violence.

Most governments are well aware that most of their citizens are much more willing to support a nonviolent movement than a violent moment—more on this later—and thus will do whatever they can to characterize nonviolent movements as violence. They have two chief strategies for doing so:

1. Characterize nonviolent but illegal acts, such as vandalism and destruction of property, as violence
2. Actively try to instigate violence by treating nonviolent protesters as if they were violent, and then characterizing their attempts at self-defense as violence

As a great example of the latter, a man in Phoenix was arrested for assault because he kicked a tear gas canister back at police. But kicking back a canister that was shot at you is the most paradigmatic example of self-defense I could possibly imagine. If the system weren’t so heavily biased in fair of the police, a judge would order his release immediately.

Nonviolence does not mean that no one at the protests gets violent.

Any large group of people will contain outliers. Gather a protest of thousands of people, and surely some fraction of them will be violent radicals, or just psychopaths looking for an excuse to hurt someone. A nonviolent protest is one in which most people are nonviolent, and in which anyone who does get violent is shunned by the organizers of the movement.

Nonviolence doesn’t mean that violence will never be used against you.

On the contrary, the more authoritarian the regime—and thus the more justified your protest—the more likely it is that violent force will be used to suppress your nonviolent protests.

In some places it will be limited to less-lethal means (as it has so far in the current protests); but in others, even in ostensibly-democratic countries, it can result in lethal force being deployed against innocent people (as it did at Kent State in 1970).

When this happens, are you supposed to just stand there and get shot?

Honestly? Yes. I know that requires tremendous courage and self-sacrifice, but yes.

I’m not going to fault anyone for running or hiding or even trying to fight back (I’d be more of the “run” persuasion myself), but the most heroic action you could possibly take in that situation is in fact to stand there and get shot. Becoming a martyr is a terrible sacrifice, and one I’m not sure it’s one I myself could ever make; but it really, really works. (Seriously, whole religions have been based on this!)

And when you get shot, for the love of all that is good in the world, make sure someone gets it on video.

The best thing you can do for your movement is to show the oppressors for what they truly are. If they are willing to shoot unarmed innocent people, and the world finds out about that, the world will turn against them. The more peaceful and nonviolent you can appear at the moment they shoot you, the more compelling that video will be when it is all over the news tomorrow.

A shockingly large number of social movements have pivoted sharply in public opinion after a widely-publicized martyrdom incident. If you show up peacefully to speak your minds and they shoot you, that is nonviolent protest working. That is your protest being effective.

I never said that nonviolent protest was easy or safe.

What is the core of nonviolence?

It’s really very simple. So simple, honestly, that I don’t understand why it’s hard to get across to people:

Nonviolence means you don’t initiate bodily harm against other human beings.

It does not necessarily preclude self-defense, so long as that self-defense is reasonable and proportionate; and it certainly does not in any way preclude breaking laws, damaging property, or disrupting civil order.

Nonviolence means you never throw the first punch.

Nonviolence is not simply a moral position, but a strategic one.

Some of the people you would be harming absolutely deserve it. I don’t believe in ACAB, but I do believe in SCAB, and nearly 30% of police officers are domestic abusers, who absolutely would deserve a good punch to the face. And this is all the more true of ICE officers, who aren’t just regular bastards; they are bastards whose core job is now enforcing the human rights violations of President Donald Trump. Kidnapping people with their unmarked uniforms and unmarked vehicles, ICE is basically the Gestapo.

But it’s still strategically very unwise for us to deploy violence. Why? Two reasons:

1. Using violence is a sure-fire way to turn most Americans against our cause.
2. We would probably lose.

Nonviolent protest is nearly twice as effective as violent insurrection. (If you take nothing else from this post, please take that.)

And the reason that nonviolent protest is so effective is that it changes minds.

Violence doesn’t do that; in fact, it tends to make people rally against you. Once you start killing people, even people who were on your side may start to oppose you—let alone anyone who was previously on the fence.

A successful violent revolution results in you having to build a government and enforce your own new laws against a population that largely still disagrees with you—and if you’re a revolution made of ACAB people, that sounds spectacularly difficult!

A successful nonviolent protest movement results in a country that agrees with you—and it’s extremely hard for even a very authoritarian regime to hang onto power when most of the people oppose it.

By contrast, the success rate of violent insurrections is not very high. Why?

Because they have all the guns, you idiot.

States try to maintain a monopoly on violence in their territory. They are usually pretty effective at doing so. Thus attacking a state when you are not a state puts you at a tremendous disadvantage.

Seriously; we are talking about the United States of America right now, the most powerful military hegemon the world has ever seen.

Maybe the people advocating violence don’t really understand this, but the US has not lost a major battle since 1945. Oh, yes, they’ve “lost wars”, but what that really means is that public opinion has swayed too far against the war for them to maintain morale (Vietnam) or their goals for state-building were so over-ambitious that they were basically impossible for anyone to achieve (Iraq and Afghanistan). If you tally up the actual number of soldiers killed, US troops always kill more than they lose, and typically by a very wide margin.

And even with the battles the US lost in WW1 and WW2, they still very much won the actual wars. So genuinely defeating the United States in open military conflict is not something that has happened since… I’m pretty sure the War of 1812.

Basically, advocating for a violent response to Trump is saying that you intend to do something that literally no one in the world—including major world military powers—has been able to accomplish in 200 years. The last time someone got close, the US nuked them.

If the protests in LA were genuinely the insurrectionists that Trump has been trying to characterize them as, those Marines would not only have been deployed, they would have started shooting. And I don’t know if you realize this, but US Marines are really good at shooting. It’s kind of their thing. Instead of skirmishes with rubber bullets and tear gas, we would have an absolute bloodbath. It would probably end up looking like the Tet Offensive, a battle where “unprepared” US forces “lost” because they lost 6,000 soldiers and “only” killed 45,000 in return. (The US military is so hegemonic that a kill ratio of more than 7 to 1 is considered a “loss” in the media and public opinion.)

Granted, winning a civil war is different from winning a conventional war; even if a civil war broke out, it’s unlikely that nukes would be used on American soil, for instance. But you’re still talking about a battle so uphill it’s more like trying to besiege Edinburgh Castle.

Our best hope in such a scenario, in fact, would probably be to get blue-state governments to assert control over US military forces in their own jurisdiction—which means that antagonizing Gavin Newsom, as I’ve been seeing quite a few leftists doing lately, seems like a really bad idea.

I’m not saying that winning a civil war would be completely impossible. Since we might be able to get blue-state governors to take control of forces in their own states and we would probably get support from Canada, France, and the United Kingdom, it wouldn’t be completely hopeless. But it would be extremely costly, millions of people would die, and victory would by no means be assured despite the overwhelming righteousness of our cause.

How about, for now at least, we stick to the methods that historically have proven twice as effective?