The effectiveness of violence and the trails of Empire

author : Drew Hendricks topic : Imperialism

by Drew Hendricks

Violence, as a tactic, works.

I know that this axiom makes most people uncomfortable, especially those of us against war. But it is obvious to any reader of history that violence has made the world we live in today. It has shaped our nation states, our ethnicities, our graveyards, our economy and our languages. Even when we challenge each others’ actions on our listservs, our arguments quickly dichotomize.

All of this is not to say that violence is desirable, or necessarily positive. But if we first start with a delusional premise, we will not get very far down the road to actual social change, much less justice. Violence works. But for what? For whom does violence work?

Violence as I define it is rooted in the imposition of one’s own will over another’s will, to get their passivity or their action in your terms rather than theirs. When we conform to someone else’s expectations of us, against our own intentions for ourselves, we’ve likely internalized some threat, some consequence, some demand made upon us. At some level, this is at the core of much of what progressives struggle against. This is true whether the struggle is against our own habits or our social roles within this violent culture.

So it is easy, indeed too easy, to see violence itself as the enemy of progress, because it is often used to defeat us. Union leaders are kidnapped, tortured, killed, terrorized. Homeless folks are tagged and examined. Kids are warehoused, medicated, diagnosed and programmed. Complex systems of privilege and rewards are upheld with coercion, and when that fails, with violence. Violence is usually used—successfully—against us rather than for us.

Critics of violence like to point out that the fruit of the tree will reproduce its parent, that violent means cannot beget peace and justice. Indeed, this is the best argument against violence. It’s why terrorism works best for Statists and Fascists. It’s why the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front strictly sought to avoid all harm to people or animals in their actions. It’s why Statists and Fascists create false flag groups to undertake fatal terrorism in the name of their enemies and create the need for “law and order,” for which they then sell themselves as the “cure.” Often that “cure” involves more terror, and more surveillance—of us.

The unfortunate corollary to the fruit of the tree argument is that it is violence, as a tactic, that has shaped the world we are in; the strange fruit of this tree drops on our own heads (often as manna, sometimes as repression) and on our victims’ heads (often as bombs, sometimes as purse strings). Violence begot Empire and we benefit from that – we live in a bubble of privileges based on this systemic violence we call an economy. We live in the “First World.” Since we benefit from this violence, we have a duty to end it, to stop this system, if we actually abhor violence itself. We might need to use a little of our own violence to stop a lot more of theirs.

It is true that this system of violence is futureless, genocidal, untenable, and not especially fun. We can also argue, thus, that violence did not “work,” and that we should therefore not adopt it even to stop a larger, even more violent, system. I, for one do not desire to be proved right by the example of my own extinction. But to withdraw the imposition of our own wills to have peace, while those who desire war exert their will upon us, upon others, and ultimately to the point of our mutual extinction, is to be finally complicit in that violence which they impose. It is not possible to oppose that will toward war without imposing our own will over ourselves and our planet for life.

At some point, when someone is stealing your labor, your land, your water and your future from you, you might want to exert your own will for these things. You might want to steal yourself back, to reclaim your life and that of your children so that there can be a future for everyone. The space we live in is the space we’ve won with our victories; the space they live in is the space they’ve forged from our defeats. It is obvious to all of us which world is more desirable and which world commands more of our time, sweat, treasure and lives.

Drew Hendricks is a local activist involved with Olympia Copwatch and Port Militarization Resistance.