The Debate on Political Violence: Understanding the Complexities and Implications, Appunti di Storia

Scarica The Debate on Political Violence: Understanding the Complexities and Implications e più Appunti in PDF di Storia solo su Docsity! VIOLENCE & PROTEST- PHILOSOPHY TUBE In 2016, 4,000 environmentalists in Germany shut down a coal mine. Germany has a lot of coal mines. In fact, they account for seven of the ten biggest CO2 emitters in Europe. So activists from the Ende GelAunde movement blockaded the Garzweiler mine and the power station next door to it, which is called Schwarze Pumpe. They broke down a few fences and sprayed some graffiti, but mainly they just stood in the way of the machinery and shut the plant down for two days. They attracted a lot of criticism. The CEO of Vattenfall, the company who owned the mine at the time, described it as "massiven kriminellen gewalttaten!". And it's interesting that he used the word 'violence' because the activists didn't hurt anybody, they were unarmed, they didn't even damage the machinery, despite being attacked and then arrested by police and despite being attacked by members of the far right party Alternative fur Deutschland, whose only problem with German coal is that it's brown. So this is the context in which I would like us to consider today's topic. The Iliad is one of humanity's oldest stories. The French philosopher Simone Weil says the true protagonist of the Iliad isn't Achilles or Goku. It's actually violence itself. It's almost omnipresent throughout the poem, both glorified and described quite bitterly almost as if Homer couldn't make up his mind about it. A lot of people seem to be in two minds about violence, especially political violence. The ecologist Andreas Malm was one of the people involved in the action against Schwarze Pumpe. He's been an environmentalist since the early 90s. In that time, millions of people have gone on marches, millions of children have taken part in school strikes for climate, there's been letter writing campaigns and Extinction Rebellion... And with the exception of the Unabomber and a few others, all of that's been completely non-violent. Malm and others say that's pretty remarkable. "It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual, by far the modern world's most effective form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as about, say, animal rights. This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalizing SUVs. In cities, SUVs are loathed by almost everyone except the people who drive them. And in a city the size of London, a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time. Say 50 people vandalizing four cars each every night for a month, that's 6,000 trashed SUVs in a month. And the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets, so why don't these things happen?" Malm also says that this inspiring tradition of non-violence has failed. In my lifetime, CO2 emissions have accelerated and there is now more money being invested in fossil fuel infrastructure. If civilisation as we know it is to survive, those investments need to be written off. That means there needs to be no more fossil fuel infrastructure commissioned, and some of what we've already got needs to be dismantled. Malm says the free market ain't going to do that because investors expect profit, and governments have so far been reluctant to make the first move, so Malm explicitly recommends sabotage. As the Ende GelAande slogan puts it, "We are the investment risk." "At what point do we escalate? When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different? When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?" Greta Thunberg turning up at COP 27 like "Right, motherf*****s! To be clear, Malm doesn't want violence against people. He advocates targeted sabotage of fossil fuel emitting devices like SUVs and power plants as part of a mass movement that remains overwhelmingly non-violent. So he doesn't want guillotines, but he does want people to consider moving from protest to direct action. Given that the vast majority of environmental action is non-violent, a lot of people obviously find that idea a little bit too spicy. It's one thing to express yourself by going on a march. It's another to actually try and do something about it. Some environmental movements, including Extinction Rebellion and Ende GelAande in 2016, explicitly rule out the kind of thing that Malm thinks is necessary. He and others say this ruling out of direct action often ignores the history of it working. People remember MLK, they ignore the Black Panthers. They remember Gandhi, they ignore the Indian Mutiny. They remember the suffragettes, but they ignore... the suffragettes, who planted bombs and threw rocks at Winston Churchill! Can you imagine the reaction you would get throwing stones, even at the statue of Winston Churchill now? We wouldn't need nuclear energy. We could power the whole country on the fury of Telegraph columnists! And | include myself here. The Stonewall Riot was one of the catalysts for LGBT rights in the English speaking world, and it wasn't peaceful. Police turned up at the Stonewall Inn in New York and started systematically rounding up and sexually assaulting trans and gay people, so they defended themselves. They threw loose change and then bricks at the police. l'm glad they did that. My life is almost certainly better as a result. And yet I have political goals now, things that would make my life better again, and I'm not using those kinds of tactics to pursue them. So why do so many people have this discomfort, almost hypocrisy, around violence? Maybe what we need is a clear cut case to sharpen our critical skills, so let's take itto the extreme. Let's talk about guillotines. France in the 19th century was an absolute monarchy. They had a lot of debt and poor people paid more taxes than rich people because rich people wrote all the laws and rich people had so captured the state that meaningful reform just wasn't happening. The people of France decided they'd had enough, so they cut the king's goddamn head off. And almost immediately, several European politicians and philosophers sh*t their f*****g pants! IMMANUEL KANT. But one man could always be relied upon to keep his pants firmly unsh*tted, and that was Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant wrote a lot of famous books, like "The Critique of Pure Reason," "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals," all of which philosophy students will know. But today | want to look at some of his lesser known albums. His later stuff, his B-sides, cause Kant actually lived through the French Revolution. | say lived through, he never actually went to France, but he read about it on 19th century Twitter. And he had some thoughts that have puzzled philosophers since because even Kant had some seemingly contradictory ideas about political violence. On the one hand, Kant was an enthusiastic supporter of the revolutionary cause. So much so that he acquired the nickname the Old Jacobin. Kant thought republicanism was great, the most rational form of government. On the other hand, he condemned killing the king and any kind of violence and even breaking the law. He was very explicit about that. "All resistance against the supreme legislative power, all incitement of the subject to violent expressions of discontent, all defiance which breaks out into rebellion, is the greatest and most punishable crime in a commonwealth for it destroys its very foundations. This prohibition is absolute. And even if the power of the state or its agent, the head of state, has violated to the original contract by authorizing the government to act tyrannically, and has thereby, in the eyes of a subject, forfeited to the right to legislate, the subject is still not entitled to offer counter resistance." And philosophers since Kant have tried to figure out how he squared these two apparently contradictory ideas, liking the French Revolution, but opposing the French Revolution. Kant was quite into what philosophers call social contract theory. It was really big in the Enlightenment. There's lots of different versions, but the basic idea is - imagine a time before society called the state of nature, where there are no laws. In the state of nature everybody has authority over themselves. So in that sense they have a certain freedom, but because people's interests conflict everybody's fighting all the time. So they come together and they transfer their individual authority to a government so they can decide what to do when people's interests conflict. That way we replace violence with politics. In return, the government might promise to do some stuff like follow the law. It depends which version of the theory you're talking about. we could engage with when spectating the Ende GelAande action is - was that actually violence? It was massiven, and it was kriminellen, but was it gewalttaten? A lot of legal texts define violence as involving some kind of physical force or damage, but then threatening somebody is often seen as violent too in law. This is potentially a very important issue because the meaning of 'violence' affects how we use other words like threat, protection, security, vulnerable populations, terrorism, intimidating protest. These words can affect our lives in a major way. Think about the difference between describing a group of people as a crowd versus describing them as a mob. One of those words paints them as potentially violent, and these words can be used to enact political control. On the previous episode of this show, we talked about Islamophobia and how the concept of threat can be deployed to paint people as violent, even when there's no evidence. It's really worth taking this in, the idea that calling something violent is itself a kind of metaphorical weapon. Violent people are not usually thought of as having the right to self-defence. If somebody attacks you and you fight back and they kill you, they can't claim self-defence "cause they started it. So by calling someone violent, you imply that they don't have the right to resist. Politicians and journalists will sell you policies making that move on everything from policing to workers' rights, to interpretation of your own country's history. Benjamin said that mythic violence can be used to establish a legal system and philosophers since him have added that it can also be used to set the boundaries of what even gets to be thought of as violent. And that doesn't mean that we should just throw up our hands and go "Oh, well, | guess it's all relative then!" Just that whatever definition of violence we employ, we should consider how it's going to be used. "We cannot simply start with a definition of violence and then proceed to debate under what conditions violence is justified or not, for we have first to settle the question of which framework is naming violence, through what erasures, and for what purpose? We cannot simply assume a definition of violence and then begin our moral debates about justification without first critically examining how violence has been circumscribed and which version is presumed in the debate in question. A critical procedure would ask as well about the very justificatory scheme at work in such a debate, its historical origins, its presuppositions and foreclosures." SIMONE WEIL. Simone Weil, the French philosopher who wrote that essay about the Iliad we started with, makes an interesting suggestion. She says that violence or force is the thing that takes away human choice. She wasn't the first person to say this. The 13th century philosopher Thomas Aquinas said that the violent is the opposite of the voluntary. If somebody loses their agency, their autonomy, their ability to affect the world, then violence is the thing that takes that away. "To define force, it is that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense, it makes a corpse out of him. In whatever aspect, its effect isthe same. It turns a man into a stone. From the power to change a human being into a thing by making him die there comes another power in its way more extraordinary. The power to make a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive, he has a soul, and yet he is a thing. Strange, a thing with a soul. Strange for the soul! It wasn't made to inhabit a thing. When it is forced to, there is not a single part of it that is not subjected to violence." Weil's definition might prompt some interesting reflections. If she's right, then violence is very common. Raising a child involves denying them choices, so that would be a kind of violence. Compulsory public health measures like mask mandates or vaccine requirements would be kind of violent as would denying somebody healthcare. The French Revolution, obviously, but also the regime that proceeded it. This means that it would be difficult to divide actions into violent and nonviolent, which is annoying because it would be really useful if we could do that. it would be very helpful if there were some particles of violence that we could detect and say "Ah, this thing is definitely 20% more violent than this thing!" But sadly, it doesn't seem to work that way. Violence is a relationship between the action and the context in which it takes place. We could consider the Schwarze Pumpe to be violent. Malm does. If you sabotage something, then you deny somebody the choice to use it, and that is a kind of indirect violence. But of course, Malm would invite us to consider the context: the much greater, though slower, violence of building and maintaining a coal fired power plant. And he's not the first person to point this out either. It's been a persistent feature of struggles for racial justice for decades. "There is a daily pervasive state violence that is never spoken of, much less acknowledged. For Palestinians living under a brutal military occupation, for marginalised, disenfranchised young people in British cities or French suburbs, for African-Americans disproportionately impoverished, disadvantaged and preyed upon by US police, surviving generation upon generation of institutionalised and violent racism, for the global south diminished and drained by neoliberal policies imposed upon it by the IMF and the WTO. If it were ever in doubt, the protests in Baltimore have shown us once again that only some types of violence are visible or really matter." The trouble of course is that you can't focus on both the action and the context at the same time. Hence the weird almost hypocrisy that we started with. To the Jacobins the violence of the French Revolution was justified in the context of what came before. But understandably that came as a little comfort to Louis the 16th who still ended up contextually f*****g dead. The million dollar question is, how do we separate the violence that we care about from the violence that we are willing to accept or believe to be inevitable? And that's kind of what politics is for. When the German police took back Garzweiler mine, most of the people involved escaped. A few hundred were arrested and then had to be released because they refused to speak to the cops and just clogged up the bureaucracy. There were some charges made, but as far as | can find, nobody was ever convicted of anything. The mine was owned at the time by a company called Vattenfall, who were themselves owned by the Swedish government who were Social Democrats and Greens, so a clever choice of target. Kindbof hard for them to ignore that context. Sadly, rather than shut it down, they sold it to a collection of fossil capitalists from the Czech Republic and it is still in operation, at time of recording. "Step forward, we hear that you are a good man. You cannot be bought, but the lightning which strikes the house also cannot be bought. You hold to what you said, but what did you say? You are honest, you say your opinion. Which opinion? You are brave. Against whom? You are wise? For whom. You do not consider your personal advantages. Whose advantages do you consider then? You are a good friend. Are you also a good friend of the good people? Hear us then, we know you are our enemy. This is why we shall now put you in front of a wall. But in consideration of your merits and good qualities, we shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you with a good bullet from a good gun and bury you with a good shovel in the good earth." Bertold Brecht.